The Gentle Wind Project has agreed to drop a defamation lawsuit against two former members who wrote articles comparing the self-styled spiritual healing group to a “mind control cult.”
Under the agreement, Gentle Wind will drop its claims against Jim Bergin and Judy Garvey, a married couple from Blue Hill, and pay them an undisclosed amount of money to reimburse them for donations they made to the organization during their 17 years of membership.
The agreement ends more than three years of litigation that began when Bergin and Garvey published online accounts of their years with the group, which they said dominated every aspect of their lives. […]
Lawyers from the Portland firm Verrill Dana dropped their representation of the Millers, claiming they had not been paid. The Millers could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
Bergin and Garvey released a written statement celebrating the settlement.
“We had a right to tell our stories of 17 years as followers of the Gentle Wind Project,” they wrote. “(Those rights) are all too often threatened when an individual or organization with deep pockets can use the civil legal process to silence whistle blowers.”
This is a summary extract of the full article as it appeared in the Portland Press Herald, Nov. 10, 2006
Freedomofmind.com fully supports religious
freedom and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The fact that a person’s name or group appears on our website
does not necessarily mean they are a destructive mind control cult.
They appear because we have received inquiries and have established
a file on the group.
The Freedom of Mind Resource Center Inc. was established by .
