ON CLOVER ROAD BACKSTAGE GUIDE 15 destroys a person's identity and is likely to create permanent anxiety about freedom of choice. The End of Involuntary Deprogramming In the United States, from the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s mind control was a widely accepted theory in public opinion, and the vast majority of newspaper and magazine accounts of deprogrammings assumed that recruits' relatives were well justified to seek conservatorships and to hire deprogrammers. It took nearly 20 years for public opinion to shift. During the 1990s, deprogrammer Rick Ross was sued by Jason Scott, a former member of a Pentecostal group called the Life Tabernacle Church, after an unsuccessful deprogramming attempt. In 1995, the jury awarded Scott $875,000 in compensatory damages and $2,500,000 in punitive damages against Ross, which were later settled for $5,000 and 200 hours of services. More significantly, the jury also found that the leading anti-cult group known as the Cult Awareness Network was a co-conspirator in the crime and fined CAN $1,000,000 in punitive damages, forcing the group into bankruptcy. This case is often seen as effectively closing the door on the practice of involuntary deprogramming in the United States. Exit Counseling Deprogramming and exit counseling are sometimes seen as one and the same. Proponents of the distinction, however, state that deprogramming entails coercion and confinement, while exit counseling assures the subject of the freedom to leave at any time. Deprogramming typically costs $10,000 or more, mainly because of the expense of a security team. Exit counseling typically costs $2,000 to $4,000, including expenses, for a three- to five-day intervention, although cases requiring extensive research of little- known groups can cost much more (estimated in 1993). Deprogramming, especially when it fails, entails considerable legal and psychological risk (for example, a permanent alienation of the subject from his or her family). The psychological and legal risks in exit counseling are significantly reduced. Although deprogrammers do prepare families for the process, exit counselors tend to work with them directly, expecting those requesting the intervention to contribute more to the process; that is, exit counseling requires that families establish a reasonable and respectful level of communication with their loved one before the program itself can begin. (edited from Wikipedia.org) An chart from the mid-1990s of the prominent leaders in deprogramming and their connections to the Cult Awareness Network, which dissolved following a lawsuit in 1996.