This page created by Ron Newman.
Last revised January 27, 1996.
A well known alt.religion.scientology participant, whose True Name is Rob Clark but who posts under the pseudonym `henry', lost his job at Accu-Weather in State College, Pennsylvania on October 4, 1995 after Scientology private investigator Eugene Ingram visited his town. He could even face criminal charges for the contents of a Usenet article that he denies having posted at all.
On April 11, 1995, an article purporting to come from `henry' appeared on alt.religion.scientology with the following line tacked on to the end of the signature:
BLOW UP YOUR LOCAL CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY TODAY!
The article attracted little attention until April 19, when Church attorney Helena Kobrin sent an e-mail complaint to Andrew Burt, the system administrator of Denver University's Nyx public-access Unix system, requesting `henry's True Name. As is his usual policy, Professor Burt forwarded the complaint to `henry', who denied making the posting Helena had complained about and said that it was a forgery. Burt also replied to Helena, telling her that Nyx's policy is never to disclose True Names to anyone other than proper law enforcement personnel. Helena sent one more reply to Burt.
This whole "bomb threat forgery" affair generated a week of discussion on Usenet (see this long and somewhat disjointed log file for some of that discussion), but that seemed like the end of this matter for all concerned. However, according to `henry', "people representing themselves as Scientologists, most particularly the user of Internet account dlt@lightside.com, who claimed to be named David Talbot," continued sending complaints to Professor Burt. `henry' says that Professor Burt "has a policy where any complaint from anyone requires the user either to promise to stop doing whatever gets the complaint or to justify it. So i had to justify every post that talbot complained about." To avoid this, `henry' eventually began posting from Netcom instead.
On July 19, 1995, `henry' received e-mail from Church lawyer Helena Kobrin, accusing him of violating the Church's copyrights and trade secrets. He sent Helena an angry reply explaining that what he had posted was fair use (and expressing sincere hope that Helena would soon be disbarred).
On October 4, 1995, Scientology's notorious private investigator Eugene Ingram visited the State College city police and filed a criminal complaint against Rob Clark, claiming that the forged `henry' posting from April constituted a "terrorist threat". The police then visited Clark's employer, Accu-Weather; the same day, Accu-Weather fired Clark, despite Clark's vigorous protests that the alleged "terrorist threat" was in fact a forgery. Henry posted a short account of these events that day; just a few hours later, Scientologists "Rick Sherwood" and "Vera Wallace" replied with a dead-agent attack on Clark, containing information from old police files about a computer breakin that Clark had apparently committed at Penn State University back in 1989.
Two weeks later, Accu-Weather sent Clark an official termination letter (this link includes annotations by Clark himself). Clark is now fighting with Accu-Weather for his right to unemployment benefits. On October 27, he posted a "Save Henry's Ass" appeal to the Net, which includes a snail-mail address where you can send money if you'd like to help him out. Shelley Thomson's e-zine **Biased Journalism** published a long interview with henry in its January 19, 1996 issue.
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