Fair Game

by Steve Cannane

  Some of the most contentious evidence given at the Royal Commission came from Rosa. She claimed she was at a key meeting of senior Chelmsford staff where they had discussed how they could alter Barry Hart’s admission form so it looked like he had consented to ECT. Rosa had previously made this claim to Toni Eatts, repeated it to police and now had put it on oath at the Royal Commission. Marcia Fawdry said Nicholson was not there. The former matron is still stunned that Rosa would make the claim. ‘I don’t know why she said that,’ says Fawdry. ‘She was a nursing assistant. It was a meeting of the executive.’110 Justice Slattery generously described Rosa’s version of events as ‘mistaken’.111

  It is highly likely that Marcia Fawdry told Rosa about what happened at the meeting, and that information was passed on to the journalist Toni Eatts. If Rosa placed herself at the meeting, Eatts could report it as firsthand testimony rather than hearsay. Dr Herron’s counsel at the Royal Commission, John Sackar QC, accused Nicholson of lying. ‘You are making this story up,’ he said, ‘and you have continued to make this story up over the years.’112

  The Sydney silk grilled the whistleblower nurse relentlessly, asking her why she had not even contacted Barry Hart when he was taking legal action against Herron. After all, this was an explosive piece of evidence that would have exposed a conspiracy to falsify Hart’s medical records. Rosa told the commission she did not pass the evidence on to Hart because ‘I had not met him’.113

  Sackar continued to press Nicholson. The barrister asked if she had even followed the progress of Hart’s court case in the newspapers. ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Nicholson under oath.114 This was inconceivable. How could a nurse who had dedicated herself to working undercover for 14 months to expose the Chelmsford doctors not even follow the first court case taken by the hospital’s most high-profile victim against one of the doctors?

  When I met journalist Susan Geason, who had meticulously researched the story for her unpublished book Dark Trance, I found out she had worked on the assumption that Rosa had all along been a spy for the Scientologists, and had uncovered further parts of Rosa’s story that did not make sense. Geason had managed to track down a relative of Rosa’s who confirmed there was no Scientologist aunt, either biological or honorary, and that it was ‘highly improbable that Rosa would have been friends with Arnold St Clair, as she did not move in arty circles’.115 When I spoke with another relative, that person cast further doubt on the story that she had joined the Church of Scientology in 1978. ‘In my mind,’ the relative told me, ‘I’ve always thought she was into Scientology and under their influence before she took that fateful casual shift as a night nurse.’116

  Susan Geason had concluded that Ron Segal sent Rosa in as a spy:

  Segal was an experienced organiser – he had led the Scientologists’ campaign against psychosurgery – and as a Guardian … would have had the backing of the church hierarchy. If this is the case, Rosa’s stories about the sleuthing operation being her own idea were designed to protect the church.117

  Rosa’s relative, who had spoken to Geason under the condition they remained anonymous, thought the author’s theory made sense. ‘She wouldn’t have known how to go about it by herself. Rosa was the classic target for the Scientologists. She had a difficult upbringing and was a bit adrift. She was looking to belong.’118

  Geason was unable to track down Ron Segal to test her theory. He was not in the phone book, and public company records listed businesses that had long closed down. All of my Scientology contacts drew a blank; they had not heard of Segal for years. I was about to knock on the doors of a few old addresses I had gleaned from electoral rolls and company records, when a contact told me they had found an email address. My heart sank when she told me it was an OzEmail account, an old email provider from the Internet’s stone age. My hunch was that Segal was dead and that I would never get to the bottom of what happened. Rosa Nicholson could not give her version of events. She had suffered a stroke in 2002 and could no longer speak.

  I punched out an email to Ron Segal’s OzEmail account, resigned to the fact I would get no response. A few days later, to misappropriate a Scientology term, Ron came back. He called me at home moments before I was due to leave to go to the NRL Grand Final. I told him I wanted to talk about Chelmsford and asked if we could meet the following day. He agreed.

  The next day, Ron welcomed me into the apartment he shares with his wife. In his late 70s, he was sharp of mind and happy to talk about the extraordinary events surrounding the Chelmsford operation. Segal had kept his files from over 35 years ago, which include newspaper clippings, legal opinions, the dossier he prepared for Frank Walker and copies of Harry Bailey’s pre-signed drug treatment forms. He remains proud of the role he played in exposing the medical abuses of Bailey and his fellow Chelmsford doctors.

  Within minutes of my arrival, Segal confirmed that he was the mastermind behind the operation. It was he who decided to put Rosa into Chelmsford undercover. ‘She was attracted to the CCHR because she was concerned about violations of human rights,’ he said. ‘She had a lot of integrity and she wanted to do something. I said to her would you be prepared to work at Chelmsford and she was. I told her what I was looking for and she got it. She did a very good job.’119

  Before Rosa came on the scene, Segal had already been planning a covert operation. The CCHR had placed advertisements in newspapers calling on people who had been victims of psychiatric abuses to contact them. Dozens of Chelmsford victims and family members rang his office. Segal knew that victims’ testimonies would not be enough; he had to get evidence from the inside. ‘I knew what to do but I didn’t have anyone to do it,’ says Segal, ‘and then Rosa comes along and we became a team.’120

  The operation was very much a team effort. Ron needed Rosa’s courage and commitment; she needed his encouragement and advice. ‘I don’t want to anyway reduce the importance of Rosa in this because she is a heroine to me,’ says Segal, ‘but she would never have done it on her own. She needed someone like me.’121

  Segal convinced Rosa that they were morally right to engage in an undercover operation and that copying and removing medical records was not illegal. He pointed out to Rosa that under the law, one of the key elements of theft was an intention to permanently deprive the owner of their property. ‘If what we did was theft,’ says Segal, ‘then the Attorney-General was guilty of receiving stolen goods.’122

  As a young man, Segal had gained a rare insight into the kind of strategic planning required for successful undercover operations. His neighbour worked in the NSW Police Force’s infamous 21 Division and shared his stories of various operations, including how they were able to shut down SP bookmakers in country towns. Segal learned all about covert operations, the importance of planning and keeping secrets. ‘They considered the local constabulary in the country towns to be part of the criminal network,’ he said. ‘My neighbour taught me about the importance of working in isolation and not letting other people know what’s going on.’123 Segal applied what he had learned from his neighbour to the Chelmsford operation.

  While many former Scientologists I had spoken to were sure that Rosa’s undercover operation must have been run out of the Guardian’s Office, Segal kept Scientology’s agents completely in the dark. He treated B1, the intelligence wing of the Guardian’s Office, with the same contempt the 21 Division had for country coppers during their SP bookmaker raids. After the disaster of Operation Snow White, Segal did not want them anywhere near his operation. ‘I reckon they are the biggest bunch of dickheads the world has seen,’ he says. ‘I thought the GO’s ideas of covert ops were idiotic, and that’s why I wouldn’t let them know what I was up to.’124 Segal did not reveal the details of the Chelmsford operation to other Scientologists until he handed over his dossier to the Attorney-General.125

  Ron Segal says he was not even aware of Project Dig, the Australian arm of Operation Snow White, which the Guardian’s Office was meant to implement, and included targeting psychi
atrists. ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ he told me. The pharmacist was opposed to psychiatric abuses, but saw no point in going after the whole profession. ‘I had psychiatrists inside the system helping me and giving me information,’ he says: ‘If I was anti-psychiatry, I’d be antithe people helping me and providing the information I needed.’126

  So was Rosa Nicholson a Scientologist when she was working inside Chelmsford? Under oath at the Royal Commission, she said she joined the Church of Scientology in 1978 after she finished working at the hospital.127 This was misleading according to Segal. ‘I believe a more truthful interpretation would be to say she was a Scientologist back then, but that she was not a staff Scientologist,’ he told me.128

  According to Segal, Rosa was not involved in church procedures or rituals while working undercover, because he did not want her to be exposed. ‘Put it this way, if they had known she was a Scientologist she would not have got the job, and she would have lost the job if they found out that she was a Scientologist.’129

  Although that might explain why she was not able to publicly identify as a Scientologist while working at Chelmsford, it doesn’t explain why the Church of Scientology didn’t want to tell the world about their triumph once the operation was over. The exposure of psychiatric abuses inside Chelmsford is arguably Scientology’s finest moment in Australia. A large part of their mission is to recruit more and more people to Scientology, to help ‘clear the planet’ and rid the world of insanity. Rosa Nicholson could have been paraded as a Scientologist and a hero, and used as a recruitment tool to draw idealistic young people who wanted to make the world a better place into Scientology.

  But Segal had other plans for Rosa. ‘I told her to disappear,’ he says. ‘I said don’t talk to me, don’t go near me, go and get a job at Wollongong, Broken Hill, sell newspapers in Brisbane, I don’t care, but just go away, because I didn’t want her to be exposed.’130

  Segal hoped Rosa would vanish for six months, slink under the radar and then help him with his plans for a new undercover operation at the Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, whose practices he believed need exposing. But that covert operation never happened, Segal left his post at the CCHR to concentrate on supporting his young family, while Rosa became a staff member at the Church of Scientology, thereby blowing her cover.

  If Ron Segal is telling the truth, why did Rosa insist at the Royal Commission that she had not joined the Church of Scientology until after she left her job at the hospital? Why did she try to distance herself from Scientology? Why would she claim it was her ‘brilliant idea’ and not Ron Segal’s? By 1989, the opportunity to go undercover again had long passed.

  Rosa did admit under oath that she had spoken at length to Jan Eastgate a number of times about her testimony.131 It seems that somebody overheard one of these conversations outside the court and passed the information onto the doctors’ lawyers. John Sackar QC asked Rosa:

  ‘Did you ask Miss Eastgate if she thought you were sounding believable?’

  ‘No,’ Rosa said. She had asked Eastgate outside, ‘How do you think I’m going? Do you think it looks all right? Is it going okay?’132

  Rosa had good reason to feel nervous. ‘I always understood that they didn’t want her to say anything that would implicate them,’ one of Rosa’s relatives told me. ‘She was very afraid to give evidence against them fearing what may happen to her.’133

  Ron Segal believes a number of Scientology staff worked on Rosa to convince her that what she did was illegal. He says that both he and Rosa were victims of a black propaganda campaign within Scientology to portray their actions as unlawful. Segal himself was the subject of a Knowledge Report asserting that he was part of an illegal operation (a Knowledge Report is a part of Scientology’s surveillance and snitching culture where one person submits a write-up of another individual’s so-called crimes). Segal disputes any claims their actions were illegal. ‘If there was evidence that either I or Ms Nicholson has acted illegally then why was no police investigation conducted nor charges laid against either of us?’134

  Segal speculated that Rosa may have been coached on how to best give evidence that would minimise the damage to Scientology. ‘There were staff members who were misleading people,’ he told me, ‘and making people do things that were wrong under the false premise of protecting the mother church.’135

  While Ron Segal did not name names, in a story I put to air on ABC TV’s Lateline in 2010, Jan Eastgate was accused of coaching an 11-year-old girl, Carmen Rainer, to lie to police and community services in 1985 about the sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather, Robert Kerr, an ordained Scientology minister. Jan Eastgate denied the claim, describing it as ‘egregiously false’.136

  However, two witnesses, Carmen’s mother, Phoebe Rainer, and a former Scientology staff member, Carmel Underwood, backed up the allegations.137 In 2011, Eastgate was arrested and charged with perverting the course of justice over the matter, but the Director of Public Prosecutions withdrew the charges the following year on the grounds there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. Eastgate never sued for defamation in relation to the allegations contained in my story, which she had previously described as ‘egregiously false’.

  There were good reasons why the Scientologists would want to distance themselves from Rosa Nicholson and her undercover operation. At the Royal Commission, the Chelmsford doctors’ counsel tried to make the argument that principals of the Church of Scientology were involved in criminal activities in relation to the removal of medical files from the hospital.138 The Church of Scientology is obsessed with good public relations. Scientologists would have been working furiously behind the scenes to ensure claims like this did not stick and that the organisation suffered no reputational damage from the Royal Commission. Hubbard once said, ‘We do not find critics of Scientology who do not have a criminal past.’139 If his followers had to own up to acts that could be labelled criminal, it would make it harder to accuse its critics of the same.

  Perjuring yourself, or asking others to perjure themselves, is a high-risk strategy at a Royal Commission, but the Church of Scientology’s ‘ethics’ system carries a built-in incentive for Scientologists to lie to police, the courts and public inquiries. It is a high crime, the worst crime of all within Scientology’s internal justice system, to make ‘public statements against Scientology or Scientologists’. It is also a high crime to testify ‘hostilely before state or public inquiries into Scientology to suppress it’. Hubbard referred disparagingly to the outside world’s legal system as ‘wog justice’. Many ‘high crimes’ within Scientology relate to preserving the organisation’s reputation.140

  Despite repeated attempts, Jan Eastgate would not respond directly to my phone calls or emails. Her Sydney lawyer Kevin Rodgers told me via email ‘there is no factual basis for the question as to whether Ms Eastgate “coached” Ms Nicholson and there was no finding of any such conduct made by the Royal Commission’.141 Lawyer Pat Griffin, who represented both the CCHR and Rosa before the Royal Commission, says, ‘I didn’t think she was coaching her, but I knew they had a lot of contact.’142

  There is little doubt that Jan Eastgate did give questionable evidence at the Royal Commission that masked her true motivations. At the commission, Eastgate was asked, ‘From your point of view you would regard it as a worthwhile social objective to do away with psychiatry as we know it in the community today?’ She responded, ‘No. I think what I pointed out before is that I feel there are a lot of abuses within the psychiatric system.’143

  This was a very different message from the one Eastgate was pushing in the International Association of Scientologists’ magazine Impact the following year. In an eight-page spread that documented how ‘a small group of Scientologists decided to rid their country of one of its biggest evils – psychiatry’,144 Eastgate wrote about Scientology’s role in exposing Chelmsford and boasted of ‘the persistence and dedication of CCHR in wiping ou
t psychiatry in Australia’.145 When alerted to these two very different versions of the truth, her lawyer Kevin Rodgers responded, ‘Ms Eastgate maintains that the testimony she gave was truthful at the time that she gave it.’146

  This persistence and dedication led to Jan Eastgate becoming the international head of the CCHR. In 1988, she was awarded Scientology’s highest honour, the Freedom Medal. Pat Griffin, the lawyer who represented the CCHR at the Royal Commission, and the journalist Toni Eatts,147 who helped get the message out about Chelmsford, were both flown to the US to receive CCHR International Human Rights Awards.148 Singer Isaac Hayes gave Griffin his award. Eatts was photographed with celebrity Scientologist Nancy Cartwright as she was awarded her prize at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.149

  It is true that Jan Eastgate’s commitment and drive were critical in keeping the abuses of Chelmsford Hospital on the public agenda through the 1980s, helping to trigger a Royal Commission, but the committed Scientologist who was the mastermind behind the exposé, and the nurse who carried it off, received no such international recognition.150

  Ron Segal and Rosa Nicholson were never flown to the US to be feted; instead they received certificates from the Sydney chapter of the CCHR. Segal does not understand why Rosa’s role was downplayed. ‘The granting of an award such as the Freedom Medal if not to the whole team should go to the individual who made the greatest contribution,’ says Segal. ‘In this case, the person who made it all happen, the one whose actions made all the difference, the one who gave meaning to all the others’ actions is solely and exclusively Rosa Nicholson.’151 (Eastgate’s lawyer says his client received the Freedom Medal, not just for Chelmsford, but also for ten years of ‘mental health reform work’.)152

  Ron Segal is right to give credit to Rosa Nicholson for pulling off the daring covert operation, but it’s hard to see how it would have occurred without him. It was Segal’s pragmatism and contacts outside Scientology that allowed him to plan and execute the Chelmsford operation. Mental health workers, including psychiatrists, gave him tip-offs, a policeman taught him about covert operations, a politician he engaged with in his local community allowed him to get the allegations taken seriously at a ministerial level.