Every week on The Moff Podcast, we share stories that are funny, strange, heartbreaking, and above all, true. I myself have been married for 56 years. Unfortunately to four different women. You can work out a whole lot of s*** in the eyes of Target. Follow and listen to The Moth on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. C-13 Originals. family you create a place for those here and those to come
The song you're hearing is called Magic Lady. It's a tribute to Chuck's wife, Betty Diedrich. Here's Elena Broslovsky, who you heard in the last episode, describing motherhood in the hatchery. Betty had just found out she had a life-threatening, serious cancer. Some people put together this beautiful montage, pictures of her and video clips about her life. that we watched and she cried, as did all of us. And...
She called a game on her and said, these people work so hard to make this for you. You're so ungracious. Can't you just stop feeling sorry for yourself for a minute? Everybody was like, oh. You know, how can he play the game with Betty? And she perked up after that and started laughing again and had energy. It was like watering a flower. He represented the business and she represented the spiritual, the beautiful, the loving, the embracing.
You also saw the way they worked together, almost like a dance. He was the horse and she was the bird. That's what they called each other. He was like a horse plomping through the environment. Stay out of his way, but then be sure to follow him because wherever he's going, something very interesting is going to happen. And with her, it was more grace. And as she got sicker, he set up a room for her, and there was a stained glass.
piece that somebody had made that hung in the room. And it had a large horse and a bird encircled together. It said the horse loves the bird. And the room that was made up for her had these beautiful white sheets with yellow flowers on them. Her bed was on a platform and then these comfortable chairs so people could sit in the room. And various people would come and kneel by her bedside, even though at this point her breathing was labored and maybe she could mutter a few words.
I would just go when I could and just sit there and be with her. And I had never watched. Someone that loved another person take care of them as they were losing them. And I watched him sit by her bedside. He had a washcloth and some water. And he would wipe her face and give her water to sip. And at this point, her breathing was like a rasping. You know, you could just hear. I don't think she was capable of saying much at all. And he was sitting by her side saying, it's all right to let go.
It's going to be beautiful. Somehow a bird got in the room and... I'd never seen a bird in there before. I don't know how it got in there. And it started fluttering around the room. And Chuck, who had been so quiet... and loving to Betty, turned and looked at us like we were idiots and said, open the door and let that thing out. So many children More than you can see In April of 1977 Betty Diedrich passed away. She had died at 3 a.m. Her last words were, take care of each other.
My name is Sari Crawford, and this is The Sunshine Place. Betty. She and I were partners, and we were sisters, and I loved her from the time she walked in until I walked out. This is Lena Lindsay, 95 years old. one of the original members of Synanon. Can you see that? And that's Lena's son, Bill Goodson, one of the first kids in Synanon.
They're looking at a photograph of Lena and Betty from the early 1960s. That's them in the water. That's me and Betty. Is that in front of the... Yeah, that's in front of the armory. In the photo, they're both in shorts and t-shirts, up to their ankles in the Pacific Ocean, with big smiles on their faces. Me and my girl, she was still that same baby.
I didn't even know that she was sick. I didn't even know that she had cancer or anything. She never let me know. Lena didn't know that Betty was dying because Lena had left Synanon. And her kids had left before she did. They used to come and have dinner with me every once in a while. And Betty told me that the kids couldn't come back. to the club anymore. She and Chuck both knew that I wasn't going to go for that. And she said to my mom, basically, for the...
betterment of the community, I don't think it's a good idea that you continue to see your children now that they're outside of Synanon. What happened soon after is my mother left Synanon. After almost 20 years of being in Synanon, the prospect of leaving would have been daunting to say the least. But I know that that conversation with Betty... seal the deal. And I know in my heart that Betty did that on purpose and made sure that my mother left before things got weird.
Things were beginning to change in Synanon, and not for the better, and particularly not for the old-timers. The original dope fiends that were still in Synanon. And my mother was one of those people. Old-timer dope fiends like Lena were in leadership positions in Synanon. and they had a lot of status because of their longevity. Rehab was still Synanon's purpose on paper, but Chuck was more interested in attracting lifestylers into the community. Chuck was all about money.
And they used to move in and give up all their stuff. And we as dope fiends used to laugh at them because we used to say, a lot of them. were crazier than the dope fiends were. Because us dope fiends, we knew that we were nuts. But they thought they were somewhere close to their right minds and they were out of their birds. Where he talked to us drug addicts like we were animals. Like we had done nothing. Somewhere along the line.
Out of all of us that helped Chuck build the place, he sort of cut us loose. Cut us loose for the people with the money. Chuck said that dope fiends like Lena came into Synanon with nine fingers, and so he wanted to surround himself with people who had all ten fingers. People like Ron Cook, the accountant who became president of Synanon.
He would say, hey, don't forget you're a nine-fingered person. It would be a way of describing somebody who came in, who'd had a drug habit, who'd been in jail, who had all these problems. You have that limitation in life. Don't forget it. Compare that to somebody who has 10 fingers, who went to college, got a degree, became a CPA. It didn't mean that I'm a better human being.
And a lot of the people who really prided themselves on being a dope fiend rehab joint, they were no longer number one in the community. And they felt resentment and they felt losses. It was becoming a different organization. It's not the same business. It moved to the next level. Chuck made his opinions about dope fiends known to the whole Synanon community in a tape game that was later called...
The Wrath of God. I created Synanon. I took you out of the gutter and gave you a new life. You will either work with me, or I'll get rid of you one by one and start all over again. but with squares who won't drag their feet and subvert my efforts. Synanon is changing. There is a place for you if you want it. If you don't, get out.
Here's Andre James, who you heard in the last episode. He was one of the young men who got a vasectomy. We're not really practicing a form of democracy, and Diedrich never said it was. He said this is a dictatorship. And I'm doing an experiment in alternative living. And if you don't like it, you can leave. Andre came to Sinan as a teenager from San Francisco. And when he got there, he was enrolled in a program that Chuck called the Academy.
which was kind of like a college for promising young people in the community. He said, we're going to give you a real education, a revolutionary education. They wanted us to help build the organization. The organization, I think, was getting bigger than he could control. Because now you had 2,000 people living in five different places across the country. How do you maintain that culture?
Chuck needed people he could trust, who wouldn't challenge his ideas, who could take the mantle from him if he ever decided to give it up. We became megaphones for Diedrich's ideas, let's put it that way. to basically spread the word with our Red Books, if you will. I always use the image of the Red Book from Communist China. Veteran old-timers, they all had their own following within Synodon. I saw a jealousy he had with them.
I think Dieter just decided that he needed to replace them with the young, new lions from the Academy. Chuck started calling people like that dinosaurs. I don't want a bunch of old dope fiends messing this up for me. And he worked to drive these people out. And he used the Academy kids to kind of spearhead it.
This is Cori Becker, who spoke last episode about how Chuck's childlessness policy affected her relationship with her newborn daughter. Before she was a mother, she was a member of the Academy. It was like the Red Guard, Chairman Mao's Red Guard. You know, just taking all these young people and sending them out to put the professors and the businessmen in re-education camps.
It was the same kind of thing. And he would tell us that we were the flies. He said, you can't go toe-to-toe in the game with these old-timers. But you can be like a fly, just annoying the fuck out of them. Pretty soon there's so many of the flies, you can't swat them all away. I was really gung-ho. If someone had done something, made a mistake, I was the first Red Bull carrier to take you into a game and expose it. We were always airing out things that could create corruption.
Whereas the veterans, they saw the wisdom in having confidences and not making everything a crime. And so the veteran was corrupt. Someone holding us back from our true evolution into a new kind of community. A lot of what made Sun and I work in the beginning had to do with creating an environment where people felt they could tell each other the truth.
Because they knew that they were going to make mistakes. They knew they were going to break the rules. And they knew they needed to talk about it so that they didn't end up running out and ODing and killing themselves. Here's Margo McCartney. who was addicted to heroin when she came to Synanon in 1963. So she was one of the old-timer dope fiends. You heard her back in episode 2, explaining why the game was the reason that Synanon worked.
Now she says the game had changed. It didn't seem to have much value anymore, didn't for me. It just got kind of nuts. Somebody was challenging Chuck in a game. It was a woman, and he got up and he poured a soda on her head. And I thought, God damn, that's out of control. That's not Synanon. He just became very insecure and didn't want anyone to criticize him. I think Chuck was, I don't know, I just think he lost it.
For years, whatever you said in a game just stayed in a game. But then certain games became public because of the wire. That changed a whole lot. Because if I'm talking to you in a room in Tomales Bay and somebody's sitting in Santa Monica and hears it, that's a message to that person in Santa Monica. That shifted the game. into something else. The game became a manipulation tool. It was Chuck. Chuck did it.
I remember Richie Gross was just kicked out of Synanon for challenging something. I think he said something about Dorothy Salant, who was a wealthy woman who moved into Synanon. I was in the game. And suddenly Chuck was there and he said, out, just get out. And he kicked him out. And he put him off the property. And it was one of those games that was broadcast.
It was horrible. I mean, I didn't want to get thrown out. Get thrown out, you're on the highway, what do you do then? That may have been my demarcation from thinking the game was a safe place to speak. Because it wasn't. I kept my mouth shut. I said, okay, I'm getting this message. Keep your mouth shut.
Robinson, host of the new podcast, The Women's Hoop Show. Each episode, I'll be joined by a rotating group of women's basketball experts to talk WNBA, college hoops, the new unrivaled league, and the shifting landscape of the sport. The game is growing and so are we. Listen to and follow the Women's Hoop Show and Odyssey podcast available now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
College holds a mythic place in American culture. It's often considered the best four years of your life and hailed as a beacon of integrity and excellence. But beyond the polished campus tours, there are stories you won't find in the admissions pamphlets. The higher-ups are concerned about one thing, and that is avoiding scandal. It's no wonder that college campuses capture the nation's attention. especially in moments of upheaval. I'm Margot Gray.
Each week on the Campus Files podcast, we bring you a new story. It was the biggest academic scandal in the history of college sports and probably in the history of academia. On Campus Files, we cover everything from rigged admission. to the drama of Greek life. A chancellor having a pornographic double life is an extremely rare case. Listen to and follow Campus Files, an Odyssey original podcast. Available now on the free...
We had a demonstrator and she made an announcement to our classroom that something really wonderful had happened. This is Selena Whitman, who you've heard throughout the series talking about life as a child in Synanon. She said that she had been chosen to go on a date with Chuck. I remember thinking what? You know, because Chuck looked like he could maybe be her grandfather.
Why was our young school teacher going out with him? And she said, well, you know, I'll tell you all about it when I get back. Selena's demonstrator was named Ginny. She was 31. Chuck was 64. After Betty died, Chuck made it known to the community that he was seeking a new partner. I put out word that my milk white body with all of its curtains was for sale.
I looked over the list. Jenny was the only one I had much contact with. I ordered her up on a silver platter. She came down and we began to get acquainted. We talked and sparred and ended up going to bed together. Chuck and Jenny tied the knot. It was his fourth marriage. Meanwhile, my dad was on his third marriage. to Miriam Bourdette. They had two children together, my sisters, Rebecca and Naomi. And since Chuck was big daddy to Miriam, they were kind of like his grandkids.
Here's Miriam. When he saw the picture of me giving birth to Rebecca, which Bill took close-up pictures of, he remarked, Look how beautiful she looks. She looks so happy. And he was very tender about that. And he patted her on the head and said, glad you're here. I mean, he didn't pick her up and hold her and, you know, rock her. And they bet he did that. But he definitely expressed his pleasure at my pleasure.
He wasn't a great father. I mean, I felt he was a great father to me, second father. It's very complicated. Chuck's ideas about parenting and relationships and many parts of his core philosophy had been with him from a young age. The quotes you're about to hear are Chuck's from the story of Synanon. by Daniel Castriel, published in 1963. Chuck was born in 1917 in Toledo, Ohio. Four years later, his father was taken from him.
My father was an alcoholic. He was killed in an automobile accident. There was another woman in the car at the time. Chuck was the oldest of three boys. and his mother worked to make ends meet. He was forced into the father role at such a young age. He struggled, and when he was eight years old, one of his brothers died from the flu. Chuck never got over the loss or the guilt. He and his mom leaned on each other. My mother used to sleep or read in my bed till I came home.
We talked until one or two in the morning. When he was 12 years old, his mother remarried. It didn't take six weeks after their wedding before we were squaring off against each other. He had stolen my girl and I had to do something important to get my girl back. Chuck began drinking as a teenager and he continued to fight with his stepfather.
until he enrolled at the University of Notre Dame. He found a father figure and a priest at school. He was a liberal, literary, and philosophic. He was the proctor on the floor I lived on. So I could spend many hours with him. I think much of my basic education took place in the long talks I had with him. Chuck wasn't a serious student.
or interested in religion, and he failed out of school. When he got back home, he picked up where he left off with his stepfather. I rebelled against everything he was. He was proper. I became delinquent. He was a Republican and capitalistic. I became a Democrat and socialistic. He was pro-business. I was pro-labor. He was God-fearing. I became an atheist. Chuck got a job with Gulf Oil. And in 1935, he got married and had a son.
He moved his family into his childhood home, along with his mother and his stepfather, whose health had deteriorated. Then my stepfather went into an involutional depression. which lasted five years until his death. He was forced to relinquish his patriarchal role, and I assumed it. Chuck then moved his younger brother and his family into the home.
I was the tribal chief and the economy of three families was established under one roof. But this time, Chuck's own health got in the way. He developed meningitis. I had been more dead than alive. I was in a semi-coma and unconscious for days. And when I was finally able to get out of bed, Large parts of my memory of my past life were gone. I didn't have any feelings. And it was rather easy at the time for me to just let go.
Complications for meningitis led to an operation that left his face partially paralyzed. Chuck's alcoholism kicked into full swing. I was drinking heavily. I realized there was something bothering me. Something gnawing and eating inside of me. Chuck got in his car and drove west, and kept going until he hit the beach. In 1943, when I left my family, I thought I would come to the west coast and die.
where there was warm sunshine. Chuck saw his life as a failure, until that one day when he stumbled into an AA meeting and began to turn his life around. By 1958, he'd formed Synodon and became Big Daddy. He was going to try to play the father role one last time, even if he had never fully reconciled with the trauma from his past. I never could be a good father. I couldn't learn when I was a child to be a father to my baby brother and I guess I gave up trying.
I always had a feeling of inadequacy. Back to Marion Bourdette. She says that before Betty's death... and the childlessness edict, Chuck found out that my dad, Bill Crawford, was cheating on her. Bill copped out he had affairs. Chuck started... putting some pressure on me to leave Bill. I said, no. He reversed course and put pressure on Bill and said, Bill. You'll never be able to regain your manhood living with a woman you've cheated on a number of times. And so you have to leave her.
And I said to Bill, I don't want to get divorced. He said, no, we're going to get divorced. And that was it. I mean, it was. My husband just handed me a note. Do I want Rebecca and Naomi to hear all of this about Bill? Yes, I do. I do. I think they know most of it. Miriam and my father got divorced, but my father rebounded. He noticed a woman named Sylvia Sternberg.
He was always nice to me, but he was nice to everybody. You heard Sylvia in an earlier episode describing how her connection to Synanon was cemented by her experience on the trip. One day... There was a daffodil by my bed on my end table with a note that said, guess who? The first time that we...
We're going to have sex. He wanted to use his room, but that was frowned upon. And me being a goody two shoes, I said, no, we're going to, I signed us up for the executive. Oh, there was the executive guest rooms. The fancy ones, right? So if you were in a relationship, you could reserve a guest room so you could have sex. Pretty crowded place. It was booked up a lot, you know. I had been with Bill for six months. All of a sudden, Chuck goes, if you're with somebody six months...
You either get married or you break up. We want people committed to each other. Well, Bill and I were not interested in separating. So he said, okay, let's get married. What the hell? 75 other couples did what we did. Bill and Sylvia, along with all those other couples, We're married in a huge group wedding. It was Sylvia's first marriage and my father's fourth. And 75 couples are dressed up.
as if they are in 1600s with these weird hats, because women then showed just their foreheads, you know, and the men had these pantaloon pants on. 75 couples walked around this horse rink. Rebecca and Naomi were our flower girls. You know, you kissed and then it was like a party. It was beautiful. Sylvia Sternberg was now Sylvia Crawford, which makes her my mom.
My mother was 28 years old when she married my father, the same age I am now. I never knew all the details about my parents' love story or what it was like being married in Synanon. especially after Betty died. Chuck remarried, but he began thinking a lot about the social constructs of traditional marriage. Here's Mike Gimbel, who worked for the board of directors. He got on his high horse about relationships, about if you can do certain things, you can love anybody. First, it was addiction.
Then it was communal living. Then education, parenting, and children. Chuck's next big experiment was going to be love. Here's Elena Broslovsky. We began talking about the divorce rate in our country. Why is it that we do not move from a platform of love? into a new relationship? Why is the cultural assumption that when you get divorced, you're going to move from a platform of hate? Before Betty died, she had been talking about this.
and she came up with this beautiful separation ceremony. A group of your closest friends would come together. Each of the couple would talk about how much... They loved the person, why they had come together, why they wanted to move from a single love relationship to friendship. And then each couple would exchange a gift. would then be welcomed back into the community. They said that after the separation ceremony, you could go back with your mate or separate if you wanted to.
So I said, well, let's just do the separation ceremony. It's no big deal. You didn't have to participate. But as an elder, we were supposed to demonstrate our commitment to Sinan and its ideas. So the next day after the separation ceremony, I went back with Bill, not even thinking twice about it. All of a sudden, there's this thing on the wire and people talking about...
No, no, no, no, no. You can't go back with your husband. You have to find somebody else. Literally over the loudspeakers, Chuck said, All marriages, all relationships are over. Everyone is defined a new partner. He's having everybody. Change partners. Chuck said, we're doing it. That's it. Boom. Everybody was dismantled. If you were in a relationship, if you were married...
You were no longer. It was dissolved. It was gone. Here's the philosophy. Who is the person that you're closest to? Your mate. Now, if you separate from that person and you connect with another person, now three people are connected. And if you do it again, all of a sudden all the people that were connected... to one person we're now connected to several people in a very deep meaningful way and everybody's trying to hook me up people were matching you
You should be with him, and he should be with you, and this one should be with you. Miriam was with Rod Mullen, the director of the school and the punk squad, but she changed partners too. We were together until changing partners. And then... He got with Naya. I got with Phil. Naya was married to Richie Gross, who got with Jan Schwartz, who was married to Dave Schwartz, who got with Terry, who was with Phil.
who is now with me. So it was eight people who were completely intertwined. Here's the kicker. You were supposed to consummate this relationship. I ended up being matched with a guy who was in love with his wife and wanted to be with his wife. And we spent the night crying. literally both of us crying. The next day, the game, and we lied. We said we had sex, but we didn't. I didn't want the pressure. Here's Margo McCartney. I didn't like it at all. I felt like a pawn in a chess match.
My husband, he came home from a trip to see Chuck and announced that he was going to be going with Chuck's secretary, whom he's still married to. I guess it was a good relationship for them. Some people, it was a gift. They had been unhappy in their marriages. And then it got nasty. People said things to their mates that were just disgusting. I'm so happy now. You were so this. You were so that.
Not just everyday things, but sexually and bodily and oh my God. How does a place tell you who to love? I thought, wouldn't it be funny? to perform some kind of emotional surgery on people who were getting along pretty well. I changed partners with my wife, who I was still really in love with. Thinking, okay, this is what it's going to take to build the organization and for us to show true loyalty. Andre James was one of the promising young up-and-comers from the Academy.
He was close enough to Chuck to notice a different motivation. Chuck found himself in games crying because he lost his wife. He was totally human. And it was all about, I'm in pain. I have to do it, so you guys have to do it. I think that he wanted us all to be at the same level of emotional stress. He was that vain and that manipulative of a person. By the end of the year, roughly 300 couples had changed partners. Now you can start to understand how interconnected people in Synanon are.
When you add kids and grandkids into it, it seems like we're all related. You're marrying the organization. You're making the cinema more important than your primary relationship. And that's what Diedrich was all about at that point. Loyalty. Loyalty to the organization first. If I get them to do this, then I can get them to do anything.
During the past three years, the number of violent incidents involving outsiders who cross Synanon's path has increased sharply. Richard Marino and Calvin Smith say they were run off this road by Synanon trucks. Synanon accused them of attempting to run down some Synanon bicyclists. Wherever Synanon went, there was always conflict with the surrounding community. In Santa Monica,
It mostly took place in community meetings and courtrooms. But as Chuck moved his core group away from cities and into remote locations, those confrontations were becoming more hands-on and violent. It started with the attack on the Gamboninis, the family of ranchers who helped runaways from the punk squad. But incidents like that were becoming more frequent.
Then Marino and Smith say they were handcuffed and beaten and their heads were shaved. Both men are suing Synanon. Hell, I thought they was, for real, they was going to kill us. I don't know, up in those hills of Tamalus, they was going to throw us in our truck and over the bluff we was going to go, I figured. The one man came up there and told us we had to take them both out and shoot them. That's his exact words. Margo McCartney.
Whether somebody actually tried to run them off the road or somebody lost their attention when they were driving, I don't know. But when Chuck heard about it, he started sending posses of people out, and they brought the guys back. I saw them sitting at the ranch getting their heads shaved. And I thought, God, that is just not right. That's how it started.
And it went all over. It went over to Santa Monica. It went to wherever we had facilities. Chuck was beginning to trust less people inside Synanon. And he didn't trust anybody on the outside. More than that, those people were a threat to him and to Synodon, and they should be treated accordingly. Robert Graham, a former drug addict who was helped by Synanon years ago, says he had a similar experience. Graham says Chuck Diedrich himself threatened him. Chuck Diedrich walked in.
And he said, I want that one's legs broken, and I want you to shove him in the back of his car and run it off the pier. Robert Graham was the worst thing you could be in Synodon. He was a splitee. An outsider who was once an insider. He had fled from the community, but then he wanted to return. And when he came back on the property, he was assaulted.
Some members say that they weren't aware that this kind of thing was happening, but my dad definitely knew what was going on. One of his jobs was to write something called the family report at the end of every year. which documented all the major events in the community. And every year, violent incidents took up more space in the report. I'm not trying to say my father was a saint, in any sense.
but he was becoming deeply concerned by it. But Chuck, he loved my dad's reports. Here's my mom, Sylvia. Chuck calls him on the wire and says, Bill, I want you to come to the home place. I want you to be the Synanon archivist. You're going to be the historian for Synanon. You know, it's like being invited to the castle, being in the royalty.
My father had different ideas, though. The growing violence was troubling to him. But more than that, he and my mom were each matched with someone else after Chuck's changing partner's edict. And he'd been moved to the Santa Monica facility. So he decided that he was going to turn down Chuck's offer. And he was going to defy his policy by getting back together with my mom.
He knew that would make them pariahs, and that their only real option was to leave Synanon, to run away. Here's my mom reading a letter from my dad. Dear Sylvia, I'd feel much relieved now that I finally really made a decision. I know those that are happily pushing through with their new relationships will probably hate us. I wish there were some way to do things right in Synanon. He has right in quotes. I love you. I'll court you all over again. Love, love, love, Bill.
That's it. As we were about to get out of there, I said, Bill, you know, Chuck's always saying... You dope fiends, you ungrateful. Don't you think you should call and tell him you're leaving and say goodbye? He says, yeah, I guess you're right. So he calls. Bill says, Chuck, I'm leaving. And he says, so long, kid, in a really nasty way. So we start to walk out the door. And we're stopped.
A phone call was made. Chuck told Santa Monica that we were leaving and that they should stop us and take anything we had on us. And they took Bill away from me. I was very nervous. You know, one of their fold was leaving the fold. Now he's thumbing his nose at Chuck and Synanon and... This is fodder for a lot of hatred. They took me in a separate room. They strip searched me. They told me to take off all my clothes.
I wanted to cooperate because I thought maybe that would help Bill. But I didn't know what they were going to do to him. I thought they were going to beat the shit out of him, to be honest. They didn't hurt him, but they strip searched him too. And then they let them both go. We walked down the stairs, we left, and we looked behind and there's... two Synanon guys following us. And I told Bill, I said, these guys back there, look, we were terrified.
My parents got into a taxi and drove to an old friend's house where they began hiding out. Now they were splitees. And not just any splitees. My father had been in Synanon for almost 20 years. He was close to the top of the organization, and he was the author of that report that documented the violence in Synanon. So if he decided to talk about what was happening inside the community...
He'd have a lot to say. We didn't know why those guys were following us. And I knew that this was not going to end well. And then a few minutes later, Richie Gross informed the Stu that Phil Ritter was on the phone, informing us that he was going to seek an injunction for, as he saw it, stopping Synanon from putting people in that terrible bind to be clipped or to leave.
Phil Ritter was a splitty too. He left Synodon because he couldn't stop the mass vasectomies and abortions. When he'd gone to the local sheriff to try to get help, the sheriff laughed at him. and told him he didn't have a problem with ex-heroin addicts choosing to get vasectomies. When the sheriff called Synanon, they told him never to come back. After that, Phil got lawyers involved.
I tried to get a court order, ordering synonym not to do the vasectomies. But by the time we got a judge that would issue an order, they had already done all the vasectomies. Phil's wife Lynn stayed in Synanon, but now she was his former wife after changing partners. Phil took further legal action and was able to get visitation rights with their daughter.
Things were getting a little crazier in Synanon, and our daughter showed up for one of these visits, obviously not well cared for, in a different place emotionally. And Lynn had a cousin who was a noted child psychologist to the movie stars. And I called her and asked if she would be willing to arrange a visit with Lynn to Synanon and kind of scope out what was going on there with the kids. She came back home.
and called me and said, things are just nuts. You got to get her out of there or she's going to get hurt. Phil got more aggressive in his pursuit of custody. The lawyer came up with an idea that we could just put Chuck on the stand and get him to talk under oath about what was going on in Synanon. and that that would probably convince the judge. And then I got a visitation from Rod Mullen and Leon Levy, who were both highly placed in the organization.
They said, you got to be aware that Synanon is a very different place now than it was when you left. Things are happening that could put you in harm's way if you continue to. pursue this idea of putting Chuck on the stand. Mike Gimbel. People left and they wanted their kids. Chuck, he wouldn't give them their kids. And so a bunch of lawyers started getting involved, and he seemed to really hate lawyers. At the same time that was going on, the Point Reyes Light newspaper...
did an expose on Synanon, and they got a Pulitzer Prize for it. It was the first time that I'd been there that the outside world was looking poorly on Synanon. It had been almost 20 years since Chuck had founded Synodon. Back then, his creation was being called the Miracle on the Beach. But after the shaved heads, the religious overtones, the runaway kids from the punk squad, the violence, the vasectomies and abortions, and now changing partners, Synanon was being called something else.
The first sentence in a Time Magazine article from December of 1977 describes Synodon like this. A once respected drug program turns into a kooky cult. I think that really got to him. He just got pissed off about it. A guy like Chuck Diedrich has to believe his own bullshit or he can't do what he did. He had to believe it enough to sell it on everybody. And now all of a sudden he's being questioned by people outside because nobody inside would ever question him.
And then on top of everything, Betty dies. And now here's this lonely guy. He's now being attacked like he's never been before. And nothing was ever the same after that. Something had changed in Chuck. Something drastic. And he announced it to the world. on national television. Synanon has many, many thousands of friends who've been helped by Synanon, and I don't know what those people might do.
I have no way of being responsible for it. Bombs could be thrown into odd places. That's too bad. That's too bad. I would certainly not institute anything like that, but I have no way of... of preventing it if it would happen. The people at Time Life will undoubtedly consider that a thinly bale threat. If they consider it a thinly veiled threat, that's their problem. I think that's kind of decent of me to warn them.
Next time on The Sunshine Place. Chuck says, we're going to build our own security department. The head of security presented a proposal for some guns. So I said, how many guns do you need? Chuck decides he needs his own security, but as his paranoia grows he decides he needs his own army. He wanted a serious outfit.
He wanted his own special forces. He wanted his own Green Berets. He developed and came up with the Imperial Marines. And the lines between protection and aggression start to become blurred. And I said to the guy, I'm going to take your own shotgun and shoot your fucking head off if you ever do this again. Don't mess with Synanon people. They'll come after you.
Thank you for listening to The Sunshine Place, a creation and presentation of C13 Originals, a Cadence 13 studio. Executive produced by Robert Downey Jr., Susan Downey, and Emily Barclay Ford for Team Downey. Chris Corcoran and Zach Levitt of Cadence 13 and Josh McLaughlin. Written and directed by Perry Kroll of C13 Originals. Editing by Alistair Sherman and Perry Kroll.
With production and editing assistance by Chris Basil and Ian Mont. Mixing and mastering by Bill Schultz. Narrated by me, Sari Crawford. Original music by Joel Goodman. Marketing, PR, Production Coordination, Sales and Operations by Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hilary Sheff, Lauren Vieira, Lucas Santrone, Sean Cherry, Lizzie Roberti. and Danny Kurtrick of Cadence 13. Cadence 13 is an Odyssey company.
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