Scientology Defector’s Epic Showdown Begins in New Braunfels Court

It reads like a half-baked Hollywood treatment.

A top official in the world’s most notorious church flees a secret compound and, presumed dead, escapes to a new life on the Texas coast. When he and his new wife are discovered, they’re so hounded by church enforcers that they haul the church to court for a restraining order. And now, inside a quaint historic courthouse in a Texas town, the church and all its big-time legal firepower must defend itself before a rural judge.

That’s the real-life story as Mark and Monique Rathbun tell it, and her lawsuit filed in Comal County last month spells it out in even more compelling detail. Before a dozen or more lawyers for the Church of Scientology and others she’s accused of stalking her, Monique Rathbun took the witness stand Thursday and described being stalked from one home to the next, harassed at work and followed overseas.

Les Strieber, a San Antonio lawyer representing the church, began building a defense based on religious freedom, suggesting Mark and Monique Rathbun are heretics who’ve been practicing Scientology outside the bounds of the church—and in violation of the church’s trademarks—and intoning that this “stalking” is constitutionally protected religious speech. With a little courtroom righteousness worthy of Matthew McConaughey, Strieber delivered one of the day’s great lines: “Your honor, I am not a Scientologist. But I am a disciple of the First Amendment.”

More at http://www.texasobserver.org/scientology-defectors-privacy-fight-sparks-epic-showdown-comal-county-court/ .