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Process Church v. Sanders (the retraction)

Events · 1972 · documented

Smoothing in both directions, in one case.123

Documented connection — the over-claim, retracted

Ed Sanders’s The Family (1971) assembled a case linking the Process Church to Charles Manson. The Process sued; in Process Church of Final Judgment v. Sanders, 338 F. Supp. 1396 (N.D. Ill., 7 March 1972), the matter settled, and the publisher, E. P. Dutton, inserted a retraction and excised the Process chapter from remaining stock: “A close examination has revealed that statements in the book about The Process Church, including those attributing any connection between The Process and the activities of Charles Manson… have not been substantiated.” The Process then sued the British publisher and lost in the UK High Court (1974); it took no monetary compensation in the US settlement. Maury Terry’s later The Ultimate Evil (1987) extended the same thesis and was savaged by name — Gavin Baddeley called Terry “a sensationalist reporter with a nose for good scare stories.”

The over-dismissal — the other direction

Smoothing also runs the opposite way, tidying the Process out of the record entirely. The publisher Adam Parfrey documented that some conspiracy literature on the Process “was either dishonest or was poorly fact-checked” — the telling example: Robert de Grimston, painted as a vanished, sinister “diabolical mystery man,” was in fact listed in the Staten Island phone book under his given name. Over-claim inflates a documented adjacency into a directed plot; over-dismissal deflates a real, findable person into a myth. Both distort; both are catalogued here.

Role in the thesis

The rail’s model case: the strongest documented fact is small (Process members visited Manson in jail; the Process ran a Manson essay in its magazine), the intent-claim built on it was retracted under law, and the correction itself then overshoots into erasure. The honest position sits between the two, and is stated as such.

  1. Process Church of Final Judgment v. Sanders, 338 F. Supp. 1396 (N.D. Ill., 7 March 1972) — the libel action; the settlement requiring E. P. Dutton to insert a retraction and excise the Process chapter ↩︎

  2. E. P. Dutton retraction notice (1972): 'A close examination has revealed that statements in the book about The Process Church, including those attributing any connection between The Process and the activities of Charles Manson… have not been substantiated.' ↩︎

  3. Mitch Horowitz, 'The Process Church: Reality and Fantasy' (Substack) — the settlement, the lost 1974 UK suit, Adam Parfrey on poorly-fact-checked conspiracy literature, and the de Grimston phone-book detail — https://mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p/the-process-church-reality-and-fantasy ↩︎

Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.

  • The Clean Version — “Ed Sanders's The Family (1971) assembled a case tying the Process Church to Manson; the Process sued, and in 1972 the publisher inserted a retraction stating that the book's claims of "any connection between The Process and the activities of Charles Manson… have not been substantiated.”