Anyway, it always comes back to the money.
In your video, beginning at about 0:20, you state: “In a recent court case … Lucien openly admitted to taking the money fundraised for court cases and for abortion rights advocacy and using it to pay his personal bills instead.”
Remember when we warned you this would be complicated? Well, here is where it gets complicated.
Because, no, we are not aware of a moment in court where TST co-owner Doug Misicko — or as “Lucien Greaves” or as “Doug Mesner” — says, “Yes, I spend the abortion rights advocacy fundraising instead on my personal bills.”
RATHER, what we have is a giant black box for the finances of the “constellation of affiliate entities” that make up The Satanic Temple. And: we have pinpricks that let light come through from various official filings and court activity to illuminate the outlines of what’s inside.
Some will claim the outlines that result are not sufficient to prove impropriety by The Satanic Temple, especially between its for-profit and nonprofit entities.
Well, if so, today is a good day — and we don’t mean secretly spending more billable hours on legal threats to young mothers.
Worth keeping in mind: if we were describing Christian televangelists or crisis pregnancy centers this way, these same people defending The Satanic Temple with “nothing to see here” would not be nearly so charitable waving off the red flags of a church-business-nonprofit.
Four things to guide you as we examine TST’s remaining complaint:
- You will read Doug Misicko (“Lucien Greaves”) admit that he was paying himself with The Satanic Temple’s funds but claim he never really kept track of how much.
- You will read Misicko and Cevin Soling (“Malcolm Jarry”) admit that they don’t see a difference between the various entities in The Satanic Temple, even though some are for-profit and others nonprofit.
- You will see some specific examples where exactly this fungibility of legal entities and their funding is demonstrated, with neither funds nor entities being kept discrete as they should.
- Together, these establish that money donated to nonprofit entities ends up being distributed back to the for-profits also owned by Misicko and Cevin Soling (and their pseudonyms) which they use to pay themselves an undisclosed amount they claim not to keep track of.
Again, what @satanxhousewife said in her video:
In a recent court case for something else TST that is involved in…Lucien openly admitted to taking the money fundraised for court cases and for abortion rights advocacy and using it to pay for his personal bills instead.
Specifically, this references Doug Misicko’s testimony in Cave v. Thurston on March 10, 2020.
What Misicko (a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves”) admits under questioning is having no set compensation and not keeping track of it. He just says it’s never more than $2,000 per month — which he immediately has to clarify is not counting business expenses.
Oh, but for “like, four months now” he says he hasn’t taken any income from The Satanic Temple. (Probably.)
Doug Misicko is giving a deposition because he’s supposed to be able to answer this stuff, but when pressed on specifics, it’s all ignorance, supposition, and generalities.
It goes on from there.
Yes, Misicko uses The Satanic Temple card and sometimes pays his rent.
“I just stay afloat.”
But Doug Misicko (“Lucien Greaves”) claims not to know how much anyone else is getting paid, including Cevin Soling (a.k.a. “Malcolm Jarry”)!
“How much do you pay yourself?”
“Dunno. Not much, and I probably stopped recently.”
“What does the other owner pay himself?”
“¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
If sincere, this would be shocking.
Per its official government registry, “The Satanic Temple (Inc.)” has one person servicing as registered agent and all governing positions: Misicko.
Who else would know about the fucking money, Doug?
YOU’RE THE GODDAMNED TREASURER
However, regardless of whether it’s sincere or not, the owners of The Satanic Temple have a history of shamelessly lying even to the point of committing perjury.
If you think that’s inflammatory language, no. We’re being quite literal here.
“That’s out of context!” OK.
By all means, let’s look at some more context.
The article above has excerpts pulled out of the most complete deposition documents we have available, but it’s still very long. Mainly, it is trying to leave out items of specific interest to that case but include everything speaking to the internal workings of TST and its owners.
However, that admission of perjury and the real ownership situation of tax-exempt church “The Satanic Temple, Inc.” comes from:
If you’re interested in what they’re discussing and want to see it for yourself, here are the Articles of Organization for The Satanic Temple, which would later become “The Satanic Temple, Inc.”
Alternatively, go to the Mass. Secretary of State entry, scroll down, click “view filings”, then “Articles of Organization” to get it and others from the government site for yourself.
Back to that Scottsdale deposition: we sometimes are told that our concerns about the corporate structure of “The Satanic Temple” are overblown, and we just don’t understand how these things are supposed to work, what with our tiny, rotted, SLAPP suit-biased brains.
People will say it’s very normal and very cool that a for-profit company that does business as “The Satanic Temple” and owns the intellectual property of “The Satanic Temple” preceded the tax-exempt church “The Satanic Temple” by three and a half years, and preceded the tax-exempt status by almost five years.
The idea is that we are the ones trying to mislead people somehow by implying this arrangement is confusing and that it is confusing in a way that should be a red flag about TST’s finances.
But actually, it turns out the only man who officially and legally is responsible for all of this stuff also claims to be confused by how they set up everything between their for-profit and nonprofit with the same name.
Misicko: “So I don’t know if it was the best procedurally, but for all intents and purposes our activities are the same, were the same, whether they were — whether they were DBA United Federation of Churches or The Satanic Temple Inc.”
Still Misicko: “Well, from my perspective they’re completely inter-related because they’re part of the — part of the paperwork process that formalized one continuous entity. Right? And it — And it consists of the same people.”
That “consists of the same people” line brings up a whole thing that was so confusing we actually had to make a table for it.
Does this help at all? Probably not.
Hopefully it does help communicate that even their official, legal filings to the government are very confusing and full of pseudonyms rather than official, legal, government names.
Really, what do you even say about the official government filings of United Federation of Churches, LLC, filings for 2018 and 2019?
Here is 2018:
And 2019:
From May 2018 till January 2019, the pseudonymous “Doug Mesner” and “Malcolm Jarry” supposedly owned and held all official positions for United Federation of Churches, LLC dba “The Satanic Temple”; from then through 2021, it’s a combination of legal names and pseudonyms.
Reason Alliance Ltd. last filed for 2021, but “Malcolm Jarry” remains the registered agent there.
What are the penalties of perjury, by the way?
Staying with the Scottsdale lawsuit, but now we’re moving on to the deposition of Doug Misicko about United Federation of Churches, LLC.
And we see these shenanigans of how they registered themselves did not escape the notice of that Arizona city’s lawyers.
Misicko: “I — I have no knowledge of him changing his name.”
So The Satanic Temple’s owners lie — that is, they knowingly say things that are not true — about who they are, who is actually present to make decisions, and who owns the various entities that make “The Satanic Temple”, including on official, sworn documents registering them.
Cevin Soling does this a lot, actually. That includes for himself as the Library of Congress and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office could tell you.
Possibly also the IRS, but we can only see this via the names listed for GuideStar, so it could just be what they’re telling the charity watchdog and not the government.
Oh, and that one weird time he called himself “Calvin Soling” in the federal court record.
Maybe others! Who’s to say.
Soling does this same service for co-owner Doug Misicko, which you see in many of those same state filings above but also in this incredible example where Misicko first writes “Lucien Greaves”, scratches it out to write “Doug Mesner” then signs it as “Doug Mesner”, which is then stamped by Cevin Soling.
That’s from Belle Plaine, which we’ll get to again later.
Now, Cevin Soling is a Notary Public of New York, so, frankly, it seems inconceivable this is an oversight as opposed to willful misstatements and false declarations of fact.
Maybe it seems a bit repetitive that we say stuff like “Doug Misicko” and “Cevin Soling” so often. Some have even seriously accused us of “dead naming” them.
But no, neither man has never made any indication they are trans. More relevant for our purposes here, Douglas Alexander Misicko will try to obfuscate, try to join a federal court case as “Lucien Greaves“, and, again, even try to lie while under oath about how he paid himself with fundraising money, utilizing his pseudonyms to do it. As we will show, Misicko actually gave a deposition as “Lucien Greaves” and talked about “Doug Mesner” in the third person and what he was doing signing that Belle Plaine document.
Bonus: in one of those numerous follow-up emails, The Satanic Temple’s lawyer Matt Kezhaya sent to The Satanic Housewife, Kezhaya also said:
You objected to my use of your legal name and your mailing address in my demand letter. We don’t use screen names in the courts, we use legal names.
Curious.
When we say The Satanic Temple lies about all sorts of things and has from the beginning, we mean it about as literally as that statement could be made.
As has been pointed out many times before, “The Satanic Temple” was originally a prank documentary film project by Cevin Soling and David Guinan that brought in Doug Misicko since neither of the former two men had any experience with or much knowledge of Satanism.
But sometime before Jan. 13, 2013, “The Satanic Temple” claimed to be theistic Satanists who believed in a literal devil, to have been founded by “Neil Bricke”, to have been founded in 2006, and to be a group that actually existed. Two days later, the website was updated to claim the group had just been founded in 2012, perhaps to make it more believable that no one had heard of them.
But! what’s worth keeping in mind is that The Satanic Temple brings this level of boldness to their falsehoods in all sorts of different spheres, and every indication is that they never stopped: they just grew larger.
The Satanic Temple’s owners provably lie on official documents and — when pressed on the record — have claimed not to keep close track of money.
Keep the dates in mind as we go forward.
A particularly generous person might read the horrible performance that Doug Misicko gave in his September 2019 depositions in Scottsdale we’ve just reviewed above and say that litigation is difficult. Perhaps Misicko didn’t have proper preparation for it from his legal team, and perhaps, despite thinking himself the most knowledgeable person about the businesses he owned, he was humbled when confronted with how little he actually knew and dedicated himself to sorting these problems out.
Except that Misicko then participated in a bench trial for that Scottsdale case in January 2020 where he endured a cross-examination and was woefully unable to rise to the moment, too.
Misicko during the bench trial, months later: “I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.”
So if we are saying that the owners of The Satanic Temple don’t bother to distinguish the various entities that make up “The Satanic Temple”, including their finances, that’s not defamation or being unkind to them.
Just the opposite: that’s what they say when asked direct questions while under oath.
Doug Misicko (“Lucien Greaves”) explains in another section of a deposition for Cave v. Thurston, the case The Satanic HouseWife’s video referenced, that it doesn’t make sense to ask questions like which entity, for-profit or tax-exempt, is involved in this particular litigation because to him it’s all part of the “larger The Satanic Temple organization” and “kind of one thing”.
TST “demonstrably is” tax-exempt even while operating for-profit, Misicko says there.
In March 2020, the state of Arkansas informed Misicko that as of February 2020, TST’s website still read “Contributions/donations support the efforts and campaigns of The Satanic Temple but are not tax deductible,” emphasis added.
The IRS tax-exempt designation came one year before.
Misicko, the resident agent and serving as all officers for The Satanic Temple, Inc. says: “I don’t know where we are in the process of updating so these things work in alignment with our current IRS status.”
He says that more than a year after the entity he is sole owner of got tax-exempt status.
You’re the goddamned treasurer, Doug.
Doug, you’re the goddamned treasurer.
So The Satanic Temple is run by liars who at best are so incompetent and sloppy they can’t keep track of where money is coming or going.
Again: this is not defamation. This is what they have shown themselves to be on the record.
But that’s terribly and unnecessarily generous.
Indeed, we also have evidence that The Satanic Temple is not just incompetent but actively malicious.
For that, we’re going to re-visit TST’s lawsuit against Belle Plaine — which these absolute geniuses lost so badly their lawyer got sanctioned for almost $17,000, and they are appealing all of it.
(Bonus: Earlier when we mentioned Matt “u/stormsmcgee” Kezhaya going on Reddit for an AMA and helpfully confirming, indeed, it was a SLAPP suit TST was pursuing against us, the occasion of that AMA was the unofficial Satanic Temple subreddit discovering the embarrassing outcome of Belle Plaine and Kezhaya trying to explain away the penalty the judge imposed on him.)
As we look in detail at Belle Plaine, these November 2020 depositions help a lot of what has already been alluded to come together more directly with something we can put specific numbers to.
First is an invoice that leads to The Satanic Temple’s owner and chief speaker Doug Misicko engaging in a “Mrs. Doubtfire”-style performance, ultimately revealing an especially embarrassing lie about self-payment.
All of that was already covered in great detail in a previous article, so we’ll try not to repeat ourselves too much.
The image on its own really speaks volumes in terms of whatever the fuck it is The Satanic Temple’s owners are trying to pull with all of these overlapping corporations.
United Federation of Churches dba The Satanic Temple, the intellectual property holder; Reason Alliance, Ltd., the nonprofit, which here is “Reason Alliance / TST”; Spectacle Films Inc., the original corporation for the prank documentary; and it’s all happening in a lawsuit officially pursued by The Satanic Temple, Inc., the tax-exempt church.
“Liars”, because that is the only word appropriate for what these people are doing.
They aren’t even that good at it. Just, no one outside of the courts bothers to try to catch them.
The original redaction in that invoice hid the name of the recipient entirely, but Cevin Soling — giving his deposition as “Malcolm Jarry” — flubbed a reference to Doug Misicko (who is himself on the record as “Lucien Greaves” and discusses “Doug Mesner” in the third person), which led the Minnesota city’s attorney to take notice of something to follow up on later.
Reminder: this is a discussion of what happened to one-third of all money brought in for a Reason Alliance, Ltd., fundraiser.
On their IRS paperwork for that year, they say Doug Misicko had no compensation: $0.
On the record, Misicko even claims a couple of times that someone else got the money being discussed.
In reality…
Misicko, as “Lucien Greaves”, finally says, “I believe that was paid to the name Doug Mesner. … It doesn’t matter either way. It was — it was a 4,000 dollar payment — to me.”
For some reason, Matt “We don’t use screen names in the courts, we use legal names” Kezhaya was in the room and OK with all this at the time.
Curious.
Maybe Doug Misicko — erm, “Lucien Greaves,” erm, “Doug Mesner” — sincerely and truly just doesn’t have the brain power required to keep track of the minute and subtle differences between “for-profit” and “nonprofit”.
Despite being the co- and sometimes officially sole owner of all these legal entities, maybe Doug Misicko is just rather dull after all, at least for this sort of complicated numbers business.
Is someone else keeping track, then?
Well, when asked about it while giving his deposition, Cevin Soling as “Malcolm Jarry” explained that Reason Alliance Ltd. was the entity that got permit for a monument instead of The Satanic Temple because it was the one that got the insurance for it because that was easier.
“Reason Alliance is a nonprofit whose mission is to promote the tenets of The Satanic Temple,” TST owner Cevin Soling says.
To the owners of The Satanic Temple, that seems to make it interchangeable with the for-profit United Federation of Churches, LLC, dba “The Satanic Temple”, for more than just insurance.
Here, Doug Misicko characterizes the distinction much the same: there isn’t one.
“I also don’t know why the Satanic Temple would be listed as the applicant as opposed to Reason Alliance. So, it really makes no — no difference to me. … It may as well be Reason Alliance or the Satanic Temple,” Misicko says.
Incredible.
We also have talked before about how The Satanic Temple’s sole entity forced to be somewhat transparent about its financials (because it is a non-church nonprofit) admitted to:
- paying Cevin Soling directly
- paying Soling and Doug Misicko’s for-profit directly.
We talked about how, by doing a little bit of deduction, we can also see that tens of thousands of dollars in “legal fees” for Reason Alliance, Ltd., were actually going to the for-profit company owned by the same two people who owned the nonprofit since United Federation of Churches, LLC, was involved in litigation while Reason Alliance, Ltd., was not.
The last public filing with the IRS was in 2019 when revenue for Reason Alliance was $360,418 — having more than doubled reported revenue every year it existed. That’s the year Penny Lane’s propaganda film “Hail Satan?” was released, bringing TST to new heights of exposure.
If you are inclined to handwave off instances of a merely few stray thousand dollars here and there, keep that in mind. Big things have small beginnings.
Reason Alliance, Ltd., still exists and was the entity behind “SatanCon 2022”, although if it was just paying for the event or also collecting the funds from it, we can’t say.
Now, how in the world can they possibly justify this level of self-dealing with a nonprofit?
We’re not lawyers, but we’ll take a stab at it because here is what Soling was referring to before about Reason Alliance, Ltd. and its “mission is to promote the tenets of The Satanic Temple.”
ARTICLE I
The exact name of the corporation is:
Reason Alliance, Ltd.
ARTICLE II
The purpose of the corporation is to engage in the following business activities:
The corporation is organized exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, and scientific purposes to promote the tenets as herein described, including, for such purposes, the making of distributions to organizations that qualify as exempt organizations under section 501(c)(3) of the internal revenue code, or the corresponding section of any future federal tax code.
The tenets are:
• one should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.
• the struggle for justice is an on going and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
• one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
• the freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo your own.
• beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.
• people are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.
• every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word
The next section of that same “Articles of Organization” form says:
“No part of the net earnings of the corporation shall inure to the benefit of, or be distributable to its members, trustees, officers, or other private persons…”
But there’s a caveat:
“…except that the corporation shall be authorized and empowered to pay reasonable compensation for services rendered and to make payments and distributions in furtherance of the purposes set forth in Article II.”
Which in this case, the owners are asserting is exactly the same thing as the for-profit corporation they both own.
So, they would presumably say, as long as Reason Alliance is doing stuff for “The Satanic Temple”, then it’s doing its mission, right? Easy-peasy.
Who decides what The Satanic Temple ought to be spending money on? Well, Doug Misicko and Cevin Soling, so they can give themselves tax-exempt money any time they want to, as much as they want to, to do with whatever they and they alone deem best.
“It really makes no — no difference to me”, indeed.
Of course, we don’t have to rely on other statements by The Satanic Temple’s owners that their for-profit corporation and tax-exempt church sharing the name, website, and more are also interchangeable or all “one thing”.
We know this because TST tried to raise $30,000 with their church — to sue us with their for-profit.
But also other places with even slight transparency. For example, the Facebook ad library for “TheSatanic Temple” includes both for-profit merchandise and tax-deductible donations despite being tied to the same entity.
What is “The Satanic Temple (Inc.)”, the tax-exempt church, doing with the hundreds of thousands of dollars they have said they raised in the name of the fight for abortion rights?
We don’t know.
But when TST lawyer Matt Kezhaya claims “various litigation efforts“, does he mean stuff like spending hours going back and forth with a woman via email to get her to recant and apologize for her two-minute TikTok video—a video which, as we’ve shown, was largely accurate and even overly generous to TST?
If the Temple’s owners hadn’t demanded a public retraction video, how would anyone have ever known? Presumably, they aren’t stupid enough to be putting records of their lawsuit threats into their national meeting notes anymore.
So just based on what we can see, The Satanic Temple seems to devote little of its resources to litigation relating to abortion rights versus pursuing private grudges like appealing its self-sabotaged Belle Plaine case, fussing with Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert in a case the ACLU was already addressing, and TST’s various nuisance lawsuits against ourselves, Newsweek and its reporter, or a billboard company.
We also don’t know about other amicus briefs we aren’t getting tipped off to, Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination complaints being pursued, or billable hours scaring TikTokers not counted anywhere in the public record.
“Today is a good day for The Satanic Temple to release its finances.”
But instead, the Temple would rather its attorney threaten lawsuits against people who reference the owners’ history of admitting to self-dealing with TST’s finances.
What do they have to hide that’s worse?
One reply on “Today is a good day for The Satanic Temple to release its finances”
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