Part V

A pattern of behavior

Let’s talk about the shitty way The Satanic Temple admits to treating members even without suing them. The neat thing is that their admission of this abuse is also part of the court record. Once again, it’s there because TST put so much of it there themselves, whether directly or by giving us the opportunity to include it ourselves.

TST kicked out the four of us — and several others — because we had been witnesses to an internal ethics complaint that made the regional leadership look bad. This was in part because it brought to light the mishandling by the same leadership of a complaint about persistent sexual harassment from years earlier.

It’s not even an exaggeration to say this. The Chapter Head of TST-WA at the time, Leah “Siri Sanguine” Garvais, explicitly said as much in a Zoom meeting that that’s why it happened. Here is her statement from that meeting:

As of last night, the people who we have locked down and gave the boot off of our server, and out of our Google Group, and denied access to the Google Drive, are Lenore, their partner [Redacted 1], [Redacted 2], ADJ, Nathan, and Leah F. And the reason that those people are in that group is because they were all CC’d on the complaints filed by [Redacted 2], working with [Redacted 2] to cause drama. And until we can suss out what their true roles and motivations are on an individual basis, we are gonna protect the chapter.

…

I think we’re totally open to critique. And I think what kinda draws the line, and how those people got into that coalition grouping, was being included by [Redacted 2] in that email. And until we can chat with them individually, it was just a matter of safety and control, quite frankly.

Leah Garvais/Siri Sanguine, then-Chapter Head of the TST-WA congregation

We attached that meeting to our filing, and it exists as a thumb drive stored with the clerks at the federal court, but you can also download it yourself at this Dropbox link, which is what we provided our lawyer when we were finally able to submit this into the record.

This is a religion purging members for being witnesses to abuse.

This is a religion making the decision at both the local and national level that the real problem with abuse isn’t that it happened, but that there were witnesses who might speak up about it and so tarnish TST’s reputation as a counter to religious abuse of power.

This is a religion deciding that actually, the fire alarm is the real problem.

One more thing to note is that nobody from TST-WA — not Garvais or anyone else representing them — actually ever took the time to “suss out our true roles and motivations.” TST never contacted or questioned anyone despite having been kicked out explicitly for being copied on an email, or, perhaps more egregiously, kicked out for being related to someone who was copied in an email. It was simply expected to be swept under the rug that Garvais purged several members under the pretense of an emergency threat to the chapter where being copied on an email was all the proof anyone needed of a “rogue coalition” (now “competitor organization”) that existed solely to “cause drama,” and that this was supposed to be the end of the discussion because she knew best.

This is reinforced further in this Twitter thread by another member, whom we know to have been there both before and after our expulsion, and who ultimately left in disgust because despite assurances from TST-WA leadership that a more detailed investigation and explanation of our removal would be forthcoming, what apparently emerged instead was a cover story that we had been kicked out for being “violent ANTIFA members.” The actual details (and any records of them) seem to have been memory-holed altogether by the leadership of TST-WA and their loyalists.

In all likelihood, anyone who joined the congregation afterward is completely in the dark that anything ever happened, and if they’re being told anything, it’s that there are bogeymen to stay away from – that there are “shitteners” who “wanted to make TST into something that it wasn’t,” or some other boilerplate fig leaf to avoid talking about how the Temple got to where it is today.

Both internal ethics 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.

Incidentally, this is something worth keeping in mind when talking about any organization, at any level of society:

Ownership determines how something is used, and when the people who run that organization emphasize that speaking up about abuse will only be considered legitimate to the extent that they’re sent through “the proper channels,” the part that’s being left unsaid is that what makes those channels “proper” is that they are ultimately controlled by people who have a vested interest in pretending that those concerns don’t exist, and who want to be able to isolate and retaliate against abuse victims as quietly as possible to maintain that appearance.

In our case, all of the witnesses — everyone outside the intended black box of “the proper channels” — were removed without any more notice than it took to be accused of forming a rogue faction to bully/undermine leadership.

The two people at the top of the local hierarchy’s notion of an investigation into a rogue faction involved unilaterally removing Nathan — a founding member of The Satanic Temple’s Seattle chapter over five years ago, who created room for dozens of new people looking for a community—while he was on medical leave.

At least 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.

To be as blunt as possible, this is a church covering up reports of abuse by expelling people simply for being in a potential position to find out that abuse was occurring. Anyone who might be tempted to launder this as unfortunate but necessary, Machiavellian realpolitik even, should stop and ask themselves whether they’d be so charitable to the same circumstances unfolding out of a nearby Christian church instead.

Local leadership was in such a hurry to disappear the ethics complaint — itself ultimately connected to the handling of sexual harassment of a past member who left after months of it going unaddressed! — and to 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 reduce all of this as “organizational failures” and “inflammation of interpersonal conflicts” on our part. And they have been running around ever since, holding up the idea that this theoretical conduct is proof of an alleged conspiracy between the four of us to hurt TST, and using that as the basis for multiple claims in multiple lawsuits across federal, state, and appeals court. But to put as fine a point on it as possible:

There are multiple people within TST who knew that these allegations were false before the first lawsuit was ever filed.

The fact that multiple claims were repeatedly dismissed, either because TST failed to state any factual basis for them or because they outright refused to when given the opportunities, makes a lot of sense in light of our removal as it actually occurred — as a cover-up of abusive and negligent leadership. This lawsuit is just doubling down on it because we elected to fight back and refuse to be held liable for theoretical damages caused by things that never actually happened.

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.

As far as we’re aware, the people who directly mishandled the original sexual harassment complaint are still in power at TST’s Washington congregation.

If you still think TST is an organization capable of confronting the damage posed by the religious right with any level of integrity — well, we’ve got bad news for you, friend.