I took a double take this morning when I looked at the front page of The St. Petersburg Times. There's a picture of an elderly man planting a sign in his front yard that proclaims Lennar sucks. At first I thought it was Ambassador Mel Sembler, AO exercising his First Amendment right to free speech to protests the legal advice he got from his attorney Leonard Englander. Turns out it wasn't Melvin Sembler and the sign is not about Lenny Englander, but well it might have been.

Hoping to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Straight Holocaust and to bring to light the plight of the survivors of the Straight rehabilitation cult, Ray Bradbury placed an unusual ad in the St. Petersburg Times offering to sell a medical device once owned by Ambassador Melvin Sembler, AO and founder of the controversial Straight juvenile drug rehab program. But nobody noticed and those few who did did not care. So Bradbury placed the item for sale on eBay. Again nobody noticed and nobody cared. But Mr. Sembler felt it was an invasion of his privacy and that the action had caused him grave emotional distress apparently by making such a personal item known to so many people. So Mr. Sembler approached attorney Leonard Englander and asked him to sue Mr. Bradbury.

In our opinion Mr. Englander should have said, "Mel I think I know how you feel, but if you're telling me that having a large audience know about the matter is embarrassing to you, I have to advise you that if you sue, it's just going to make it a thousand times worse. It would make a story just begging to be told by the press." But that's not what Mr. Englander appears to have advised. Instead, Leonard seems hell bent to sue on behalf of his client and consequently, as anyone would have predicted, the press has made a field day of it. First Tampa's ABC Action News did a segment, and worse (or better), the video is on the Internet for all the world to see. Next Andy Barnes and his pro-Sembler St. Petersburg Times who had up till then ignored the story, was forced to carry it. He put it on the front page because where else could such a story go. And since the St. Petersburg Times is read internationally by cult watchers because it does an excellent job covering the antics of the Church of Scientology™'s navy down there in Clearwater, netizens are picking up on the story. So now the story is spreading around the Internet just as Englander should have advised his client it would. If you do a Google search on "sembler pump" (of course don't use quotes) you will find these links:

If you do your own search you will find a lot of pages in French with "sembler" and "pump". Forget it, "sembler" means "to seem" in French. We will keep you informed as other articles appear around the globe.

How dare Mr. Sembler sue Mr. Bradbury (or any victim from his torture chamber he calls a drug rehabilitation program) for intentional inflection of emotional distress. After all, perhaps as many as 50 thousand people were intentionally inflected with emotional distress and psychological terror at Straight. What does he expect from Mr. Bradbury who was shanghaied into Straight, deprived of food and sleep, denied an education and the opportunity to play sports, denied the right to cavort with members of the opposite sex. Doesn't matter if he did it to Bradbury yesterday or 20 years ago, the psychological scars and the educational setbacks are there forever. What did he expect to produce in Mr. Bradbury. Let Richard Bradbury tell his story.