“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” — Elie Wiesel
“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Anyone who has been harmed by a power hungry, abusive cultic figure has the basic human right to speak out the truth about that cultic figure and his or her group. It doesn’t matter whether a person willingly joined that cultic figure’s group or was an “outsider” or “enemy” targeted by that cultic figure. Truth needs to be spoken and spoken well. If abuse and wrongs have been committed by cultic figures and their groups then we owe it to ourselves and to others to speak out the word of warning about them. Not to do so is selfish and cowardly, and on some level shows the same cold-hearted indifference to others that cultic figures and their groups show to people. We need to care.
Anger can indeed be a strong motivator for outing a dangerous cultic figure, but that anger needs to be tempered with true concern for the truth and for others’ well-being. Speaking out the truth about cultic figures cannot be merely about vengeance.
My efforts to expose the spiritual and financial predatory actions of my cult figure brother Ken “Pastor Max” Parks, a limited purpose public figure, began after consultation with attorneys to discuss the best means to try to put an end to my brother Ken’s very publicized defamation, stalking, death-threatening terrorist campaign against me, my husband, my mother, and dozens of other innocent people. Unlike most of my brother’s victims, I knew about his criminal records and the child abuse investigations against him. The fact that my brother Ken was promoting — and continues to promote — himself everywhere, especially on the worldwide Internet as a trusted spiritual leader of his “ministries” and as a photographer and computer expert, has made himself a public figure open to public scrutiny.
If a power hungry, abusive cultic figure is publicly promoting him or herself, and you have indisputable facts, such as public criminal or civil court records, or a verifiable record in their own writing such as a death threat, sexual harassment or other harassing content, or any other incriminating statements, then you have the right, and perhaps some may argue the duty, to truthfully out those cultic figures in the same public manner that they use to deceitfully promote themselves.
Over the years I’ve have been contacted by my brother Ken “Pastor Max” Parks’ other victims asking if I knew why he was targeting, publicly defaming, harassing, and threatening so many private individuals. Some of them provided alarming and disturbing written statements my brother Ken had sent to them, which I then in turn published, again due to the fact that my brother Ken has been promoting himself in public to gain “public trust” — my brother’s own written words — and oftentimes using defamation against innocent people in order to appear victimized and thereby manipulate people into feelings sorry for him. Some of these people my brother Ken defamed and harassed tried to assure themselves that if they just ignored him that he would just grow tired and go away. I told them that extremely aggressive attention seeking stalkers like my brother Ken will never tolerate being ignored and will certainly never go away. The only method that has worked to deter his fraudulent publicity efforts and his use of defamation to gain sympathy from naive, unsuspecting people is publicly outing him, such as I’ve done in my websites and in my book Fighting for Justice: Religious Fraud, Mental Illness, and the Collapse of Law & Order (www.fightingforjusticebook.com and https://www.amazon.com/Paulette-Buchanan/e/B09N4ZBGY2%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share). My publishing of the public criminal and civil records against my brother Ken and his own incriminating statements, as well as other people publicly posting truthful statements against him on social media, have done much good in getting the word out and warning other people about who and what my brother really is. Consequently, Ken has lost a lot of support (a fact that he himself has complained about in his public social media posts), and his defamatory attacks against me and others have diminished because he knows that if anyone does a search on my name or his other victims’ names they’ll find my websites and my book that reveal the truth about him.
Starting years ago and continuing up to the present point in time, my brother Ken — a self-professed hacker — stalks and defames his former friends, acquaintances, and high school classmates, and there are strong indications that his stalking includes hacking into these people’s social media accounts. Apparently, my brother Ken hacks his victims’ social media accounts for three reasons: 1) to use their accounts he hacked in order to post flattering, supportive statements on his own public social media pages to make it appear that those people absolutely adore him; 2) to use his victims’ hacked accounts to post messages to his other targeted victims on social media to find out everything he can about their private lives; and 3) if or when his victims find out that he has presumably hacked their accounts, he apparently gets a real rush from exerting terrorizing power and control over them.
My brother Ken the self-professed hacker posts up on his public social media pages (Facebook, for example) horrific defamatory statements referring to people’s privately posted medical information or other private details. Other than hacking and/or setting up fake accounts in other people’s names, there is no other way he could have obtained such personal details from people that we know for a fact have told him and others that they want nothing to do with him. In some cases when my brother Ken has apparently hacked and taken over these people’s social media accounts there are indications that he locks these people out of their own accounts. Further indications point to him then setting up new fake accounts in those people’s names, using photos and information found in their original account to make the new fake account appear legitimate. My brother Ken then apparently proceeds to use his victims’ public friends list found on their original account to send out new friend requests for the new fake account he apparently set up in his victims’ names. Of course, Facebook rarely responds to serious violations like this, and this problem could most likely be avoided if people set up very strong passwords, and changed those passwords periodically, and gave only bare bones information on their social media accounts. Since Facebook, being such an immensely unethical and powerfully lucrative corporation, refuses to enforce its own terms of service, it’s left up to victims to warn others about my brother Ken “Pastor Max” Parks, and others like him, who apparently use social media as hunting grounds to hack into victims’ accounts and set up new fake accounts using their names.
Attention seeking cultic figures must be outed, but outed in the right way. If you’ve been targeted with publicized defamation and libel by a cultic figure who has made him or herself a public figure, limited purpose or otherwise, then talk to an attorney who specializes in free speech rights. You have a right to speak out against that cultic figure’s use of public defamation and libel against you and/or others, but you need to speak out in the right way, using the right words and forums. Might the abusive cultic figure file a meritless lawsuit in response to you exercising your freedom of speech rights? Yep. And if they are as aggressive in seeking public attention and “punishing” you as my brother Ken “Pastor Max” Parks has been when he filed nine legal actions against me and my husband — admitting that he only did so to cause us to incur defensive attorney fees — then whether you speak out or not they may still stalk you through the courts by filing harassing, utterly meritless lawsuits, just as my brother Ken did (we obtained both state and federal injunctions prohibiting my brother Ken from so easily abusing the court system against us or anyone else ever again). As our attorneys told us, if someone wants to sue another person for no good reason whatsoever, our broken courts allow them to do that — up to a point. Fortunately a number of states have anti-SLAPP laws that can dismiss those meritless lawsuits fairly quickly, but unfortunately the financial damage you incur to pay an attorney to defend your innocence will, no doubt, give endless delight to the abusive cultic figure because rarely will you be able to get the cultic figure to pay up the judgment amount awarded to you by the court. I will be writing another article later on about creative ways that victims of abusive sue-ers like my brother Ken “Pastor Max” Parks can financially recover from the legal expenses incurred from defending their innocence.
On September 15, 2022, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) introduced the SLAPP Protection Act in Congress — https://raskin.house.gov/_cache/files/f/b/fbb6b8d1-fa69-4c17-adbb-6445ff63b8a0/291D1533375A72AC20E4EB67F9244109.bill-text—slapp-protection-act.pdf . SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. On one hand, if Rep. Raskin’s bill were to be enacted into law it could require instantaneous judicial review and thereby put a quick end to any meritless defamation lawsuits filed in federal court, with very limited financial cost to the innocent defendants. But it could also be used to dismiss legitimate defamation lawsuits. Alarming lies — such as defamation per se, in which you are being accused of violating laws and of being a criminal — that are intended to incite some form of harm against the person is not protected free speech, and the courts have upheld that principle, including in states that have anti-SLAPP laws (such as my home state of Tennessee). I still very much believe that lucrative media and Big Tech corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and all others need to be sued into oblivion for all the defamation, defamation per se, threats, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, etc. that they make money from publishing, and their leaders should also face multiple criminal charges. These Big Tech corporations publish their terms of service — contracts between themselves and users and non-users alike — yet second-by-second every single day these Big Tech entities violate their own contractual terms of service. That is fraud at best, and complicity with murder, drug and human trafficking, and other serious crimes at worst.
In summary, we cannot let some pathological bully cultic figure silence or intimidate us from speaking well-verified truth, and the laws are on our side. We have a basic human right to defend ourselves and to speak the truth, and to speak it well. Refuse to be silenced, out of self-respect and out of respect for other victims and potential victims.