Tears came out of nowhere. I brushed them away, ashamed that I was so helpless and could do nothing about what they had done to me. Rape: I felt violated. The most important investigative story of my life, and here I was sitting in my living room watching traffic go by from my window, because the men I worked for decided they wanted a man \u2013 a team player they were comfortable with \u2013 instead of a woman on the story that I found, investigated, and shot on Peoples Temple in Guyana. I was ashamed that I still felt like a victim. Powerless. But I was.<\/p>\n
Self-doubts crept in again. Didn\u2019t they think I was tough enough to go to Jonestown? I had just aired a powerful series in June on \u201cNightly News,\u201d then anchored by John Chancellor, on the Synanon cult. Pulling it together had been a grueling ordeal that almost cost me and my crew our lives.<\/p>\n
Cameraman Mark Allan, soundman Don Miller, and I had heard the sound first \u2013 the rhythmic beat of distant drums. It was 8 a.m. on a warm day in early May. I was planning a series on the Synanon organization, and this was our first day in the field. The Marshall-Petaluma road, an hour and a half north of San Francisco in Marin Country, was deserted. Rustling fields of rye hid whatever was coming toward us.<\/p>\n
Mark, my favorite West Coast freelance cameraman, first told me about the Synanon cult led by Chuck Dederich in March of \u201978. I had a tough time getting the story okayed by NBC News executives because Synanon was now a non-profit organization trying to get approved by the I.R.S. as a \u201cnew religion.\u201d Joe Angotti was nervous about going after so-called \u201cnew religions\u201d for First Amendment reasons. And the organization was litigious, in the midst of lawsuits with ABC and Time<\/em> Magazine, which called it a \u201ckookie cult.\u201d<\/p>\n But more important, Angotti didn\u2019t want to make waves because NBC was in transition. A new controversial corporate president had just been named. Fred Silverman, the creator of the popular Charlie\u2019s Angels<\/em> show \u2013 \u201cThe man with the golden gut,\u201d as he was known \u2013 was an entertainer. He couldn\u2019t care less about news, especially news that might bring trouble. Silverman was known for kicking elevators, temper tantrums, and firing people on a whim. His big broom was poised to sweep out the old NBC crowd \u2013 the \u201cnewsies\u201d \u2013 and replace them with his own gang of hip young people from CBS and ABC, where he also had been corporate president. Silverman was on a roll, and Angotti didn\u2019t want to get in Fred\u2019s line of fire.<\/p>\n Even before Silverman\u2019s arrival, Angotti anticipated lawsuits with Synanon, Scientology, the Moonies, the Children of God and Peoples Temple. The Temple\u2019s tactics of intimidation and threats of litigation worked locally in California and virtually shut down media investigations on the West Coast. The Reverend Jim Jones, leader of Peoples Temple, was becoming a powerful man in San Francisco politics and could bring in votes for politicians. First Lady Rosalynn Carter allowed herself to pose and socialize with Jones at a political event that received national coverage and wrote him a short note on White House stationery regarding his views on Cuba. She suggested he speak with the evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, President Carter\u2019s sister.<\/p>\n Now Synanon, which had a media strategy relationship with Peoples Temple, was on the warpath with Time<\/em> magazine and an ABC affiliate in San Francisco. The group had been emboldened by a victory against the Hearst Corporation, which settled a lawsuit with them for $2.6 million. My timing for a high-profile investigative news series about destructive cults couldn\u2019t have been worse.<\/p>\n Angotti, who later became a news consultant, and his close friend, Les M. Crystal, who was NBC\u2019s new young news president and is now at the helm of Lehrer Productions at Public Television, wanted to keep their heads down. (Insiders said Crystal\u2019s middle initial stood for \u201cmarshmallow.\u201d) Also quaking with fear about losing his job was Cory Dunham, the head of the legal department. So here I was in California doing a very dangerous story with a nervous, unsupportive news management and a frightened legal department. I tried to block out the corporate politics and concentrate on my investigation of Synanon and Peoples Temple, and was idealistic enough to believe we were still in the business of public service, providing viewers with information they needed to know.<\/p>\n Ironically, Synanon started out doing the same type of good work as had Peoples Temple. Synanon founder Chuck Dederich made the cover of Life<\/em> magazine for rehabilitating \u201cdope fiends\u201d and \u201cdrunks,\u201d as he called them. He had been an alcoholic for many years and bragged that he started Synanon with his first $35 unemployment check. (Many of his so-called \u201ctough love\u201d therapy techniques are still being used in drug treatment programs.) But then, very gradually, the organization evolved into the cult of Chuck Dederich, the man, just as Peoples Temple became synonymous with the Rev. Jim Jones.<\/p>\n Synanon became controversial, secretive, and dangerous. Farmers and ranchers in Point Reyes, California, where Synanon was buying up property, lived in fear of what they perceived was a growing menace. Farm animals and pets began turning up dead, butchered and mutilated in what appeared to be satanic rituals. The talk was that Dederich had paid off the local sheriff to look the other way. Two Synanon members were deputized into the department.<\/p>\n Mark brought the van to a stop as the sound of the drums became louder. He looked over at me expectantly. Don, the soundman, a chain smoker, lit another cigarette nervously as he put a wireless mike under my jacket and tested his shotgun microphone that would catch ambient sound. We all left the van and waited on the empty road.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t see anything, but the drumbeat was getting closer. We heard barking dogs and stared at the fields of rye waiting for Synanon to make its appearance. Then we saw them \u2013 about 75 men, women and children with shaved heads and wearing overalls. Four German shepherd dogs strained at their leashes. Some people were beating long, narrow, small-headed drums with their hands. From a distance they looked like an army of ants on the move. They were carrying signs: \u201cEntertainers go home.\u201d<\/p>\n One young child had a dead chicken on a stick \u2013 his vision of the symbolic NBC peacock. A young man with dead eyes who moved like a robot carried a sign that said \u201cAPRL.\u201d Later I learned that APRL stood for Alliance for the Protection of Religious Liberty, an organization of the most powerful cults, including Scientology, that was effectively silencing the media from coast to coast.<\/p>\n Mark never stopped staring into his viewfinder as he selectively taped the fields of rye, the empty road, and the approach of the menacing crowd. Don pointed his shotgun mike in the direction of the sounds. I flicked on my wireless. Suddenly, a person wearing a gorilla suit appeared out of nowhere and soundlessly jumped up and down. I saw that some of the skinheads were carrying rifles over their shoulders. Others had what appeared to be pistols in holsters at their waists. No one said a word. Mark captured the scene.<\/p>\n Finally, two men with shaved heads of medium height approached me and asked what I was doing. \u201cNone of your business,\u201d I answered. They accused me of trespassing. I responded that we were on public property. I then asked if NBC News could have an interview with someone in charge, preferably with Chuck Dederich, if possible. They snickered, turned their backs on us, and left.<\/p>\n The rest of the group stood in silence waiting for instructions on what to do. We thought that was it for the day and started packing up our gear. Then Mark pointed to the new arrivals of big trucks. \u201cTrouble,\u201d he said, \u201cwe\u2019re not done yet. He started rolling tape on the trucks. Four of them converged on the van and surrounded us. Synanon members parked the trucks to block our exit and raised the trucks\u2019 hoods.<\/p>\n \u201cThere must be a Bermuda Triangle here,\u201d mocked a Synanon member, \u201cbecause our engines gave out.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, the group of skinheads, ranging from children to adults in their forties, circled us without speaking. I tried to interview some of them, but word was passed from one Synanon member to another: \u201cDon\u2019t talk to them.\u201d<\/p>\n After a half-hour of this silent encounter, we escaped by driving through a muddy pasture. Meanwhile, a rancher Alvin Gambonini, who had seen the blockade building up from his farmhouse and been severely beaten by Synanon a few months earlier, called the sheriff\u2019s office. A local paper, The Point Reyes Light<\/em>, sent its news editor, Keith Ervin, who arrived just behind the deputies to meet with us on the road at the end of the field. He photographed me and the crew filing a police report to take to his editors, Dave and Cathy Mitchell. Mark taped the event for our series and \u2013 to be sure \u2013 for NBC lawyers in case we were accused of provocation.<\/p>\n While this was going on, more people with shaved heads kept appearing out of the fields of rye. Synanon brought out over a hundred reinforcements to chant protests about news media coverage. The noisy protest was still under way when we arrived at The Light<\/em>\u2019s office. I interviewed Dave and Cathy Mitchell, then called Joe Angotti in New York and told him what happened. I asked for permission to hire a chopper for the next day to photograph the sprawling Synanon properties from the air. There was a long pause followed by a barely audible, \u201cI\u2019ll get back to you.\u201d<\/p>\n I thought the show\u2019s budget was on his mind with the new executives in place. \u201cI\u2019ll have a story for you tomorrow about what happened after we get the aerials, Joe.\u201d<\/p>\n He said something like, \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about it tomorrow,\u201d and abruptly hung up.<\/p>\n What I didn\u2019t know until later was that Angotti immediately called the legal department and briefed them about what had happened. Ordinarily, we\u2019d only call in lawyers if there were legal questions in a script that we were unsure about. What I did realize as I hung up the phone was that Angotti never asked if we were okay.<\/p>\n The crew and I walked outside. To our surprise, the street was deserted. We drove down the road to where it all began. Don stopped the van and he and Mark got out. They began rolling again but all we could see was empty rye grass moving gracefully in the wind.<\/p>\n Dave Mitchell, who had been trying to get law enforcement and the public to take Synanon seriously, tipped off the San Francisco papers and the wire services about NBC being detained by Synanon. I had messages from the local San Francisco newspapers and the Associated Press and United Press International when I returned to my hotel. The newspapers ran articles the next day. The wire services ran a bulletin that night. But NBC \u201cNightly News\u201d didn\u2019t even mention the encounter.<\/p>\n Back at the bureau that evening, Angotti left a message that we could hire a chopper. The next morning, Mark, Don, and I drove to the airport and hopped aboard. Mark shot footage out the window as we made the half-hour helicopter trip to Point Reyes and the Walker Creek Ranch. As we headed north and approached the Synanon compound, people started running out and pointing up at us. Mark told the pilot to descend so we could get some faces on camera with our long lens.<\/p>\n We heard it before we saw it. Rifles. Pistol shots. The pilot ascended quickly and we continued photographing the scene. I didn\u2019t expect that they would actually shoot at us. The crew and I were shaken, but no one showed it. Afterwards, Mark, Don, and I stared at each other. Synanon physically detained a network television crew. And shot at them. What next?<\/p>\n I was on an adrenaline high by the time I reached the San Francisco bureau. I called Angotti, who was as laconic as he had been the day before. \u201cGive me 1:30. It\u2019s a heavy news day. If we don\u2019t use it tonight, you can use the footage in the series.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUse it in my series?\u201d I couldn\u2019t believe what I was hearing. A camera crew detained by a bizarre cult brandishing guns and the next day shooting at us from the ground. The incident might not even make the show, although it was national news on the wire services.<\/p>\n What I later learned from a disgruntled news lawyer who left the network was that Synanon\u2019s legal department had already called NBC News\u2019 legal department. Fearing legal reprisal from them, and more important, the wrath of Fred Silverman, the ten thousand-pound gorilla now running a once-great network, the home of Huntley and Brinkley, NBC caved in to cult pressure.<\/p>\n No story ran that night on \u201cNightly News.\u201d The footage later would appear in my series on Synanon that aired June 12, 13 and 14, with a fourth part later that month. That series unleashed a chain of events that ultimately led to the spiking in October of my series about the Unification Church, Scientology, Children of God, and Peoples Temple. The Peoples Temple series was ready to air six weeks before the Jonestown massacre that claimed 918 lives, including about 300 children, three newsmen, and congressman Leo Ryan.<\/p>\n But by this time NBC executives were frightened. There had been death threats as well as legal threats to NBC. A lawyer in California investigating Synanon was almost killed by a rattlesnake bite. The snake was put in his mailbox by Synanon members. In New York, Synanon got into Fred Silverman\u2019s building in New York. He feared for his family. I was followed home from work and picketed. My desk at NBC was broken into and a notebook of addresses was stolen. The RCA building was picketed by about 50 cultists, chanting and carrying signs. I thought it went with the territory. The lawyers watching these incidents in the lobby at 30 Rockefeller Center didn\u2019t appear to share my view of \u201cterritory.\u201d<\/p>\n I made it clear to management that my series on the destructive cults, which management reluctantly approved after the Synanon series aired, would have Peoples Temple as the centerpiece. In October, when the work was done, I stressed that we air the series quickly. It would show the need for government protection of the Ryan party \u2013 that for everyone\u2019s safety we had a responsibility to run this story before they left California for Guyana. Jim Jones, the leader of Peoples Temple, had been practicing suicide drills and was a known drug addict. He had nothing to lose if he was exposed so violence, and mass suicide was a strong possibility. Angotti had watered down my Synanon series before it aired, and now he looked at me as if I was just another hysterical woman going through her period.<\/p>\n No one else going with Congressman Ryan thought that Jonestown was anything but another tough story. Jones might be a madman, but kill a congressman? Ironically, the journalists thought they\u2019d be safe because Leo Ryan was leading the group. Congressman Ryan thought he was safe because he had the journalists and a NBC network television crew with him, with a seasoned reporter who had covered Vietnam and looked and acted as tough as Clint Eastwood.<\/p>\n What I learned much later from my former boss, Bill Wheatley, then senior producer of \u201cNightly News,\u201d was that \u201cClint\u201d was full of himself and didn\u2019t take criticism or editorial changes without a fight. Wheatley questioned his news judgment and considered him a loose cannon. Nevertheless, Harris was a man. And in 1978, there were no female investigative reporters at the networks, much less women who expected to cover dangerous stories with men in the jungle. Women did fluffy, soft features or consumer stories. They weren\u2019t in network newsrooms except as secretaries.<\/p>\n I had no allies there. I didn\u2019t fit in with them, and the women shut me out. To them I was an overeducated outsider whom their bosses tolerated. A token. Who did she think she was? It didn\u2019t matter that I had already won an Emmy for a series on cocaine as well as other awards, had two years of print experience with a Gannett newspaper, a Master\u2019s Degree in English, and two books to my credit while working at CBS answering audience mail letters. Audience mail. Writing form letters to viewers. That\u2019s what I had to do to get in the door at CBS.<\/p>\n It was Wheatley, seven years my junior and without the middle-age man\u2019s prejudice against women in the newsroom, who gave me my chance to work on \u201cNightly News.\u201d I came up with original investigative stories that he noticed, but received no praise from the establishment men who ran the program. I was a non-person. A woman. Invisible. These men weren\u2019t comfortable with working women, a new breed, and ignored me.<\/p>\n It was so bad then that when two of my main sources on the Synanon cult series passed through New York \u2013 their print work had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting on Synanon \u2013 I was not invited to their meeting with management and anchorman John Chancellor. It wasn\u2019t until later that I learned that Dave Mitchell and cult psychologist Richard Ofshe were even there. They told me they had asked where I was and was told I was out of town. I had been a phone call away.<\/p>\n I had grown accustomed to not being invited to story meetings, even meetings about my own stories. Wheatley was given the embarrassing job of reporting back on a need-to-know basis. I felt humiliated and left out, but back then I accepted it as \u201cnormal.\u201d It was. I was reminded of it every day.<\/p>\n In mid-October, Angotti and Crystal spiked my story on the destructive cults without explanation. Shooting stopped. My California replacements were given the assignment. Except for Don Harris reading my copy of the Gordon Lindsay report for research purposes, I was ignored.<\/p>\n Harris didn\u2019t return my phone calls about that report, which was the story proposal that sold the story back in June. And he never asked to see the footage I already shot or my rough cut. The Peoples Temple series was put on the back burner, I was told by a sympathetic news lawyer.<\/p>\n I was speechless. I was so shocked that I didn\u2019t get angry \u2013 as a man would, I guess \u2013 and demand an explanation. I had been conditioned to be well behaved, know my place, and be grateful that I was working on \u201cNBC Nightly News.\u201d Nevertheless, I took the bold step of tipping off a friend at The New York Post<\/em>. It published an item that led NBC to issue a press release that said NBC News was \u201cnot caving in to pressure from the cults\u201d and that the decision to take me off the Jonestown story was strictly \u201can editorial decision.\u201d I was off the most important story I had ever worked on before or since.<\/p>\n Access to all information was cut off. Corporate president Fred Silverman made that very clear to the legal and news department heads. I found that out by accident at a local NBC news hangout called Hurley\u2019s. Soon after I was taken off the story, I was having a drink at the old oak bar. Silverman\u2019s second in command, Paul Klein, who had come over with him from CBS, sat down next to me.<\/p>\n
![\"Photo](\"..\/..\/..\/images\/jtr11\/07-06.jpg\")
<\/a>