To Amazon.com, Kindle Direct Publishing
Currently on the Amazon website there are several books listed, one currently for sale and one in pre-sale status with a September release date that need to be removed.
The books, entitled The Truth About Apostates: The Scientology Story (Exposing Crimes Book 1) and The Truth about Apostates: The Misconception Answering Manual: Every Single Lie The Apostates Tell – Answered In This Manual. (Exposing Crimes Book 2) are written by a Scientologist named Ryan Prescott.
Book one contains multiple violations of KDP Content Policy and is simply nothing more than a 74 page booklet created to achieve two purposes.
The first is to entice the reader to inquire into Scientology and the second and more serious is for the bullying, harassment and public shaming and attack of former members.
These members who Mr. Prescott lists by name multiple times within the pages of his book are people who have chosen to leave Scientology, thus exercising their First Amendment Right of freedom of religion. Scientology has as a written Policy something known as Fair Game. It is a directive wherein anyone who chooses to leave the cult and speaks about their experiences is labeled an “enemy” and a “Suppressive Person”. Once labeled Suppressive, Fair Game states :
“Fair Game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”
—L. Ron Hubbard
With that policy in mind, Ryan Prescott wrote these books which do anything but create a safe and welcoming space.
Those who Mr. Prescott name within the pages are only targeted because of the choices they have made concerning religion and/or only because they have spoken about their experiences with this one religion. Leah Remini, Mike Rinder, Amy Scobee and others he publicly outs would not be receiving this treatment were the choice of religion not the issue.
He has already violated policy with the book Escaping Leah which seems to have already been removed. This second attempt to damage the reputations of people already suffering at the hand of Scientology should hopefully be enough to convince Amazon that Mr. Prescott is not an author worth sponsoring or encouraging.
The book The Truth About Apostates contains multiple egregious violations:
1. In violation of the KDP Content Policy it provides an entire chapter containing testimonials lauding the benefits of Scientology to encourage and promote Scientology products and services.
2. In violation of the KDP Content Policy the author includes within the book complete names and addresses of various Scientology Organizations and encourages the reader to check Scientology out for him or herself.
3. It contains an entry naming Mike Rinder and publicly exposes Rinder’s financial income, whether or not it is a true statement is irrelevant. This violates Rinder’s right to privacy.
4. Even if Mike Rinder’s financial information as exposed were true Prescott has no legal right to that information nor to publicly disclose it in this format. Upon investigation Prescott will be unable to substantiate the correctness of his statement in violation of KDP Terms and Conditions, 5.1.3
“…and you represent and warrant that any information and documentation you provide to us in response to such a request will be current, complete, and accurate. You authorize us, directly or through third parties, to make any inquiries we consider appropriate to verify your rights to permit our distribution of the Books and the accuracy of the information or documentation you provide to us with respect to those rights.”
5. Prescott claims that it is “Truth” and “Fact” that major companies such as A&E Network, HBO Documentaries Inc, CNN, ABC and others are guilty of discrimination and are paid to “bash Scientology”, another patently false, inflammatory statement with absolutely nothing to back it up.
6. Throughout the book he alleges that those he lists are the recipients of some mysterious “investors” who are paying the former members to speak out against Scientology. Yet another unfounded statement that he cannot provide any proof of and is simply to make his victims look like hired antagonists.
Under the KDP Content Guidelines it states;
“Public domain and other non-exclusive content
Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store.”
By the author’s own admission per the bibliography the entirety of the sources he uses, though without footnotes, quotations or any other notation, comes from Scientology owned websites. Just because he is a Scientologist does not give him the right to source public domain content from Church owned and created accounts. Although he has a bibliography, there are no notations in any of his chapters for any of the claims ergo it must be assumed that the entirety of the book is made up of public domain content found in the various Scientology smear sites he lists.
This alone should be enough to remove his books from the Kindle marketplace.
Finally there is the serious issue of content quality.
“Content published through Kindle Direct Publishing is held to the high standards customers have come to expect from Amazon.”
—https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200952510
This entire book shows an abject deficiency where basic sentence structure and word usage are concerned. Frankly that the author is not ashamed to expose his lack of basic writing skills is amazing.
“Scientology has thousands of churches and millions of members. The total count is everywhere at once.”
“The list literally goes on with only a few at the top and then dwindling to lesser known and mentally questionable apostates cashing in for anything can get.”
“Therefore, when you hear from any of them you will never be able to find out about Scientology because they’re full of misinformation (and like a communicable disease you have to be careful not to get infected).”
“After looking for myself at the operations of those are vested into the purpose of profiting off of false allegations and exaggerations towards Scientology, I decided to take it upon myself to write a few chapters for all those interested and/or affected by this virus of information.”
“The Scientology Religion is an ultimate success. My golly, it is completely successful for a new religious movement.”
Based upon the content, purpose and violations as presented here I am respectfully requesting that Amazon not only remove these books but ban Ryan Prescott from any future attempts to Fair Game and harm innocent people.
Confront And Shatter 