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Nov 9, 2022 · Paul Robert Morantz was born on Aug. 16, 1945, in Los Angeles to Nathan and Jeanette (Kates) Morantz. His father owned a meatpacking business, and his mother was a homemaker.
Nov 2, 2022 · 8 min. Paul Morantz, a California lawyer who crusaded against brainwashing self-help gurus, crooked psychotherapists and menacing cults, including one that nearly killed him with a rattlesnake ...
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Oct 29, 2022 · Paul Morantz dies; L.A. attorney nearly killed when cult planted rattlesnake in his mailbox. Steve Marble. October 28, 2022 at 8:01 PM. It wasn't lost on Paul Morantz as he charged after the cults ...
- Steve Marble
- Untold Stories in The Cult Capital of The World
- From Skid Row to Synanon
- Screams Echoing Through Santa Monica
- The Bait and Switch Rescue Mission
- Dangerous Opposition
- Stepping Up The Heat
- An Unlikely Attempt
- Recording Everything on The Wire
- His Voice Inside My Head
- Mr. Dederich Punches His Way to Washington
“I like your Mickey Mouse collection,” I half-shout to Paul Morantz from the living room of his home in the Pacific Palisades. He has an enormous display case filled with antique figurines and toys. Mostly Disney, and mostly Mickey Mouse. “Yeah, a lot of them are from the 1930s,” he replies from the kitchen as he makes us both some tea in the micro...
Morantz’s foray into advocacy for the powerless started in 1974, when he took on the case of Skid Row alcoholics who had been picked up off the street in downtown L.A. and effectively sold to mental institutions. They were kept drugged up to the point of incoherence so that the facilities could fraudulently bill Medicare. He spent over two years bu...
As it turns out, Morantz had already encountered Synanon over a decade earlier. “My first memory [of Synanon] was my high school graduate party in ‘63 and we happened to be on the beach behind what was the National Guard Armory, which they were in. I got rip roaring drunk and I wandered off and got near the building. There was this large screaming ...
“Terry had gone completely psychotic,” Morantz tells me about his rescue mission in 1977. “One of the reasons I was able to get her out was that they really didn’t want her anymore.” The cult had gotten really good at separating new recruits from their money. But it was in no way equipped to deal with real mental illness. By the late 1970s, Synanon...
In one of the worst attacks on an outsider, Synanon members viciously beat a trucker in Badger, California on November 11, 1977 after a benign road rage incident where the trucker supposedly cut off a car full of Synanites on the highway. Dederich reportedly shamed the four Synanon men involved for not physically attacking the trucker in retaliatio...
The following months, Synanon would escalate its intimidation and reign of assaults on people outside of their organization. The group had always manipulated and abused many members inside, but by the 1970s they were circling the wagons for a full scale attack on outsiders. They had purchased a large cache of weapons; over $300,000 worth, by the FB...
When the attempt on Morantz’s life did come, the method was a complete surprise. On October 10, 1978, the anti-cult crusader opened his mailbox and stuck his hand inside, believing that what he couldn’t quite see inside was a package of some sort. It was, in fact, a rattlesnake. The snake bit him. He ran shouting to his neighbors for help. A rattle...
Morantz shows me a box of cassette tapes of Dederich’s recordings. They’re largely off-the-cuff ramblings of a narcissist commanding his flock. But some contain the screams of people being beaten—a warning for all Synanites to hear. Others directly call for violence against outsiders like Morantz, even giving out his address in the Pacific Palisade...
“I listened to so many of his tape recordings that I had a hard time getting his voice out of my head,” Morantz says. “Sometimes I found myself thinking like him, and I would sort of have to catch myself.” The only time that Morantz found himself in the same room with Dederich was when he took his deposition for the civil trial over the attempt on ...
For all that he did to undermine Synanon, Morantz ended up watching its rapid downfall from the sidelines as he moved on to other cases. While the attempts on the lives of its enemies in 1977 and 1978 contributed to its unraveling, perhaps the group’s biggest misstep wouldn’t come until it tried to make a name for itself in Washington, D.C. It star...
Nov 7, 2022 · Paul Morantz, a California lawyer who crusaded against brainwashing self-help gurus, crooked psychotherapists and menacing cults, including one that nearly killed him with a rattlesnake, died October 23 at a Santa Monica hospital. He was 77. Palisades resident Bob Vickrey wrote on October 31: I heard today of the passing of one of my longtime ...
Paul Morantz, a lawyer and investigative journalist who in the 1970s was so successful at taking on cults, abusive psychotherapists and self-proclaimed gurus around California that one of his targets tried to assassinate him with a rattlesnake, died on Oct. 23 in Los Angeles. He was 77. His son, Chaz, confirmed the death, at a hospital.
Oct 23, 2022 · Paul Morantz, a California lawyer who crusaded against brainwashing self-help gurus, crooked psychotherapists and menacing cults, including one that nearly killed him with a rattlesnake, died Oct. 23 at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 77. Mr. Morantz's death was confirmed by his son, Chaz Morantz, who declined to provide a cause.
