Manufacturing a 'Cult' and its Leader: 'Beyond Our Ken', a Pseudo-Documentary Based on a Hostile Narrative

Narrator: Techniques used by Melissa to create a fictional documentary.

Melissa spent over 12 hours interviewing Ken, by himself or with Jan. In all that time, she did not really get the answers she wanted to demonise and attack Ken and Kenja. so she created a fictional documentary based on cutting and pasting answers from getting a question put to Ken and not showing his answer but taking an answer from a completely different question for example, Melissa begins this process at the very beginning of the documentary in 1993, Ken and Jan did an interview with Mike Willesee on a current affair. Mike Willesee put a question to Ken and Ken answered that question. Here is the Current Affair footage.

Mike Willesee: Mr Dyers, you've been described in Parliament as a seedy con man, a liar, a cheat and a bully. What do you say to that?

Ken: I said that's his privilege because he's speaking under privilege of Parliament.

Mike Willesee: But what do you say to it?

Ken: I don't think I am.

Mike Willesee: None of those things?

Ken: I'm not those things.

Narrator: As you can see, Ken is very certain in his denial of these allegations. So, she does not use Ken's answer.
She takes Mike Willesee's question and cuts and pastes an answer Ken gave to a different question in 2006.
Here is the question from Melissa that Ken answered in 2006.

Melissa: So is the number one thing you process people on, is the number one basic thing that comes up, what would that be? Would that be hate?

Ken: No, no, it goes into different levels. It goes into, first of all, the illusion that they're living under. Life's an illusion. Energy's just energy. We put significance in some of it and it creates an illusion. This is an illusion we're having here now. it's not the whole truth the truth is unattainable it's an absolute.

Narrator: Now what does Melissa do but cuts and pastes and shortens this answer of Ken to the 2006 question, to appear to be an answer to Mike Willesee's 1993 question. Here is the Beyond Our Ken footage.

Mike Willesee: Mr Dyers as you've been describing in Parliament as a seedy con man, a liar, a cheat and a bully. What do you say to that?

Ken: Life's an illusion. This is an illusion we're having here now. You know? It's not the whole truth. The truth is unattainable. It's an absolute.

Narrator: ** She is inventing Ken's answers to questions in order to demonise him, manufacture a narrative and not permit the denial to be shown to the audience. Ken is made to appear as if agreeing to Willesee's proposition. This is how Melissa manufactures a cult leader. Just to emphasise, this is a question Ken was actually answering in 2006.

Melissa: So is the number one thing you process people on, is the number one basic thing that comes up, what would that be? Would that be hate?

Ken: No, no, it goes into different levels. It goes into, first of all, the illusion that they're living under.
Life's an illusion. Energy's just energy. We put significance in some of it and it creates an illusion. This is an illusion we're having here now. It's not the whole truth. The truth is unattainable. It's an absolute. No absolutes are attainable. Beauty is not attainable. There's different varieties of beauty. Truth is simply comparative.
How close it is to a total reality which we don't understand. If we had a total reality, we could create that plant and that flower or what, you know.
We don't have that total reality. So we compare the truth with what we consider the truth.
It's closer to the glow. It's closer to it.
It's closer to where the human species survives. and less toward pain and suffering, you know, it gets closer, that's all.
Does that answer your question?

Melissa: Yeah, it does.

Narrator: The real story of Michael Beaver, a young man who improved his life using the Kenja training.

Melissa gave neither Ken nor Jan any warning that she was about to throw questions at them about Michael Beaver. This concerns events that had taken place in 1992 and 1993, some 14 years before Melissa's interview.

The context of the questions Melissa asked clearly showed that she believed Kenja was to blame for the suicide of Michael Beaver. Melissa claimed that the only reason she was putting questions to Ken and Jan about this was to give them the opportunity to answer everything fairly.

Melissa: Because I really want to give you and Kenja the opportunity to answer everything... that's come up publicly, yeah.

Jan: What has never happened is there never has been an investigation into how these charges came about. It's a very unique situation.

Narrator: Melissa presented herself as someone who'd showed this story of the attack on Kenja fairly in her film. Jan explained in detail the facts of the Michael Beaver story, and that she had documentary evidence to back this up. Melissa said she was interested in seeing these documents.

Jan: I think if that accusation's put there, it has to be answered with the facts that we have.

Melissa: I agree, which is why I asked you about it.

Jan: That case we have a lot of documentation on. And we'll meet again and I'll run all those documents.

Melissa: Well, yeah, we'll work out a date next week. I'm out Monday, but otherwise any day next week.

Jan: What, you'll fly up or something?

Melissa: Yeah, yeah.

Jan: OK.

Melissa: Because I think this is important and it's been, um... Yeah, and we've run out of time today, so...

Jan: Yeah, yeah ok

Narrator: What was revealed to Melissa - and what did she do with this information?

The information revealed to Melissa in the interview by Ken and Jan obviously surprised her. Yet again, Melissa refused to show any of the footage that would show these facts to the viewer.

At this point, neither Jan nor Ken knew that Melissa was interviewing Annette Stephens or Wendy Beaver or the other people, all antagonistic towards Ken and Kenja - Ken and Jan could have been even more specific if Melissa had been honest about this.

Michael Beaver was a young man who used the Kenja training to rehabilitate from drugs and an unfortunate lifestyle. Melissa does not indicate in the documentary where Michael was before he did the Kenja training and how he used it to improve his situation. This confuses the story and hides the positive effect training in Kenja had on Michael.

Here is a clip from an extensive, almost three hour long interview with Ken and Jan that Melissa leaves out.

Jan: His brother particularly was involved in this area, so Michael faced a choice at that point in his life. Was he going to go down the criminal drug path of his brother, where his family was leading him, or did he want out? For a brief period of his life, he became involved with the young people in Kenja, right? As was common at that time, his father came -

Ken: How long -

Jan: It was very brief. It was under a year, okay? During that time, Michael had extreme acne all around his face. He was really what you would call a sad young man. The acne all cleared up. His whole life changed. He was a sportsman who'd let sport go, all sorts of things, he got back into that, he became a very operative young man.

Narrator: There is no indication in Beyond Our Ken of the positive effect Kenja training had on Michael. Then the pressure of Michael's brother's criminal activities put Michael in the position where he had to choose between the ethically-based activities of Kenja or joining his brother. Michael chose his brother and we had to ask him to leave.

Two years after Michael's involvement with Kenja. After Michael's involvement with drugs and criminal activities of his brother, Michael found himself in a very bad mental state. Remember, this is two years after his involvement in Kenja. And under the influence of the drug and criminal lifestyles of his brother - Michael was in such bad shape that he needed to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

In this interview, Jan clearly explains to Melissa the diagnosis by doctors of Michael's condition and his drug addiction - two years after being asked to leave Kenja because of his links with criminality via his brother. Michael was in a serious, problematic state, with serious drug addiction, and had attempted suicide. Doctors diagnosed his condition as paranoid schizophrenia.

Melissa withholds this. She does not clarify the seriousness of Michael's condition in her documentary. Here is a clip of Jan explaining it to Melissa.

Jan: Two years later, Michael re-emerged at a psychiatric hospital in Sutherland. His basic problem was drugs, he has, he was involved with kava, he'd taken speed, he was involved with marijuana, like I mean he simply was, had a full-time life problem with drugs that's very sad, but that was the choice that michael had made two years earlier. He was in and out of Sutherland psychiatric hospital, he was diagnosed as extreme uh, I think it's paranoid schizophrenia.

Narrator: So the audience is never aware how serious Michael's condition was. Melissa excludes the part of Jan's interview which reveals the doctor's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. By withholding the facts about Michael's medical condition, Melissa intends the viewer to accept his mother Wendy Beaver's viewpoint on his condition - ignoring the actual diagnosis by Michael's doctors.

Here is a clip of Wendy Beaver on Beyond Our Ken.

Wendy Beaver: I don't think I know anybody in my age group that once at least in their life didn't try marijuana and like a few beers with one's peers, football. So I don't think that was a reason not to associate with his family.

Narrator: Who is Annette Stephens? Because at that point Annette Stephens and her agenda influenced Wendy Beaver and Michael Beaver. Melissa will leave out all of this association, and the influence on Michael, out of her documentary.

Annette Stephens was asked to leave Kenja in 1992 for ethical reasons and was refused permission to open a Kenja centre of her own. None of this is mentioned about Annette in the documentary. Melissa never told Ken and Jan the names of the people she was secretly interviewing, so Ken and Jan were not given any right of reply.

Annette was the first person to publicly attack Kenja, and a founding member of the group Cult Aware, which was formed to promote deprogramming, associated with the American hate group Cult Awareness Network that Jan mentions in the documentary. Given the seriousness of the attack on Ken and Kenja by the organisation Cult Aware and Annette Stephens' key role in Cult Aware, this information should have been included in the documentary. But Melissa never raises this to Annette Stephens or even asks her a question about it in Beyond Our Ken.

But instead she uses "shadow man" - a very suspicious character, who had been asked to leave Kenja because of his inappropriate relationship with his daughter. "Shadow man" will falsely claim that Cult Aware is a figment of Ken and Jan's imagination, and this is what Melissa leaves the audience with.

Here is the clip from Beyond Our Ken, and see the way Melissa has presented it. She has the founder of Cult Aware in her documentary and refuses to acknowledge the association of Annette Stephens with Cult Aware.

Beyond Our Ken footage - Jan speaking: They got articles in the newspaper, what you call cult articles in the newspaper, attacking us as a cult, attacking Ken as a cult leader. They simply set a plan of how they would destroy Kenja. Their plan didn't really work for about six months.

Beyond Our Ken footage - shadow man: The only way to destroy Kenja is to destroy Ken, he said, that's what these people are up to. And then they introduced the whole of this figment of imagination called Cult Aware. He said, Cult Aware is out to get us.

Beyond Our Ken footage - Jan speaking: Cult Awareness Network is basically a hate group, which means they operate on hate and the basic premise is like the Ku Klux Klan. And if you've got anything wrong with you, it's because of these people over here. Let's blame these people. And they motivate hate, they motivate anger, and they give people an excuse for what's happening to them now.

Beyond Our Ken footage - shadow man: It's a big American company that's over here and it wants to wipe out cults and then start doing counselling work with everybody and make money. So there was all this motive for why it was happening. It was a bigger game than us. The police were in on it, the judges were in on it.

Narrator: Melissa had seen documents clearly showing the formation of Cult Aware in Australia, and its association with Annette Stephens, and its intention to "deprogram" people. The fact that she never asks Annette Stephens about her involvement with Cult Aware is dishonest. The viewer is left with the impression that Cult Aware is an imaginary group - whereas Melissa was interviewing Annette Stephens, one of the founders of Cult Aware in Australia.

Back to Michael Beaver - what Melissa leaves out.

Michael Beaver was in and out of hospital over a two-year period, as doctors medicated him to handle his paranoid schizophrenia. One of the issues noted by Michael's doctors was Wendy Beavers inability to come to terms with her son's diagnosis. Under medical treatment, Michael began to improve. But Wendy Beaver saw an article in the local newspaper and got in contact with Annette Stephens, who convinced Wendy that her son did not have paranoid schizophrenia but was just in effect of the cult and needed to be deprogrammed.

Jan: And one local person who who reads that newspaper is a very disturbed lady with a past of her own called Wendy Beaver. This lady has her own problems and one of the things she's having great trouble with is this son of hers, who has been in and out of a psychiatric hospital for now about the past eight months. She has great trouble herself coming to terms with it. That's documented.

Ken: In and out of a hospital? Was that after he was in Kenja or was it before?

Jan: After, that was about, approximately two years after he left Kenja.

Narrator: Now Annette Stephens began to work on Wendy Beaver.

Jan: So these three people now get a call from Mrs Wendy Beaver saying, "I think my son might have been involved in Kenja, this is his problem, like you say Kenja is a cult, he isn't really a paranoid schizophrenic, he doesn't have any problem", by the way the doctors in hospital are beginning to put to, to help Michael, it's a very serious case, there's serious drug abuse there, it goes back to his brother, and he, they are helping him. So you see that with medication he starts to calm down, they start to help them. But she is in absolute denial that her son is a paranoid schizophrenic, they - these three people get Wendy Beaver on side, they're in in communication with her. She is in communication with them.

She now has an 'out' for her denial. The son is no longer a paranoid schizophrenic. He doesn't have a medical problem that can be handled with her help and the rest of the family's help. He is just a product of having been with this cult. She is encouraged in that belief.

Narrator: Annette Stephens pressured Wendy Beaver to talk to a newspaper reporter so they could use a story about Michael in the pursuit of the attack against Kenja.

Jan: Then we get a call from the reporter from The Leader saying, tell us about this Mr Stephen Mutch - look we have another mother, I've spoken to another mother her name is Wendy Beaver, she tells me her son has problems because of his association with Kenja, but she's also said to me, please don't let anybody know this, because I feel that if Michael knows that I am attacking Ken and Kenja, he will commit suicide.

That's what the mother had said to the reporter. I give the reporter the documented story that I'm now giving you, with memos from our area, young people who knew Michael at the time, the whole thing, and the reporter does not pursue the story of Michael Beaver, presumably because the mother has said, if Michael finds out that I'm involved with these people, he will commit suicide. Because one thing Michael never did, right up until the day of his final suicide ,he never would badmouth Kenja and he never would badmouth Ken.

Narrator: Melissa saw documents showing this to be correct and did not approach it in any way in the film.

Their pressure on Michael to badmouth Kenja became apparent. His mother, with Annette Stephens, set Michael up to be deprogrammed.

Here is more footage of Jan that Melissa left out.

Jan: Now we see a change in Michael, after this association of Wendy Beaver. Wendy Beaver now sets up for Michael to be what is called "deprogrammed". She sets him up to meet these these people, linked with Stephen Mutch and these people who are attacking Kenja, they begin to work on him. They begin to work on him to attempt to get him to realise that he's not a paranoid schizophrenic - that his problems come about because of his association with this cult, Kenja. They begin to work on him.

Narrator: Documents show that Wendy Beaver and Annette Stephens continued to work on Michael for several months.

Jan: Eventually he becomes convinced that his paranoid schizophrenia will be cured by what is called deprogramming.

Narrator: Deprogramming - an attempt to forcibly change a person's belief system from that of the 'cult' to that of those paying for the deprogramming.

Jan: I don't know whether you've investigated deprogramming, whether you're aware of it, it goes right back, goes back to its criminal origins with kidnapping, the use of drugs and sex to simply ah -

Ken: Locking them up and get groups of people onto them, bombarding them, bombarding them, bombarding them.

Jan: That's the clean version. That's the modern version of it. Before that, it went back to sex and overwhelming kidnapping and drugs.

Narrator: Melissa makes no mention of deprogramming and its effect on those attacking Kenja. Back to Michael Beaver.

Jan: His mother takes Michael out of the hospital, takes him down to Melbourne, they stay with Annette Stephens. Annette Stephens brings Michael to what Michael himself and his mother calls a deprogramming. At that deprogramming - because a deprogramming can involve people, as you said, bombarding people with realities.

...

Jan: ... trying to restrict it just to the documents that I have, all right? Now we don't know a lot so I'll tell you what we know. We know that Michael and his mother stayed at Annette Stephens' house. We know Annette Stephens brought Michael and his mother to meet Martin Katchen. Martin Katchen goes to the house of the mother, one of the mothers of the three girls who were later to charge Ken, right, she's a lady we had asked to leave Kenja, because over a year or two years very large amounts of money had gone missing and the third one happened and she didn't give her -

Ken: Two thousand dollars worth

Jan: Yeah really big time stuff, and she couldn't give a satisfactory explanation as for where it went. Okay, this woman who is associated with Annette Stephens, they're friends, and her three daughters are at her house, and Annette Stephens brings Wendy Beaver and Michael Beaver to this house, he meets these girls, you know they're young, they're his age. Martin Katchen comes to the house. We have to assume he is the deprogrammer, he's - Wendy Beaver or Michael Beaver says I'm going to melbourne to be deprogrammed by somebody doing their doctorate in the Kenja cult, he does go to melbourne, he goes to to their house, they had this meeting.

Melissa: Did he tell you he was going?

Jan: We have records where his words are quoted. They're nothing from us. And I can show you those records, which are documentation of what his mother said and what he said, right?

Ken: This came up in the court case.
Narrator: Michael was taken off his medication during this deprogramming. None of this is included or even approached by Melissa.

What happened to Michael after he was deprogrammed?

Jan: He comes back to Sydney. Again, he is admitted to hospital. I believe during the next year he again attempts quite serious suicide attempts. Only now his talk is different. He starts talking about "possession" and "spirits taking him over" and he starts talking about everything would be okay if he could just be hypnotised. That's what Michael says. "If I could just be hypnotised, I would get rid of all these demons from my association with Kenja."

Narrator: The doctor treating Michael commented that this belief by Michael and his mother, Wendy Beaver, that Michael's medical condition could be cured by deprogramming was delusional. Annette Stephens and Wendy Beaver kept pressuring Michael.

Jan: These people are still in communication with him and his mother during this period. He is admitted to hospital again and again. By the way, what also comes out is these people asked him to go off his medication when he was in Melbourne. They are encouraging him to go off his medication. But the only thing that's helping him when he's in hospital is the medication. That's when he starts to get a stability.

Narrator: Finally, they convinced Michael to go to Stephen Mutch, another key player in the attack against Kenja. After Michael goes to see Stephen Mutch, Mutch claims to have a letter written by Michael bad-mouthing Ken and Kenja, something Michael had refused to do up to this point.

Stephen Mutch produced this letter in Parliament. We felt Michael did not have the ability to string together the complex sentences in the letter.

Jan: Stephen Much reads out to Parliament a letter that this Michael Beaver is purported to have written. We've had the letter analysed. Michael Beaver, for example, was almost illiterate and quite incapable of stringing complex sentences together.

Ken: Yes, that was obvious.

Narrator: But soon after seeing Stephen Mutch, Michael Beaver committed suicide. The bad-mouthing of Ken and Kenja was something he had refused to do up to this point. Jan showed Melissa documents proving Michael's links with Annette Stephens and associated people just before his suicide.

Jan: All of this was withheld from the police. So therefore, what happened in the press is "young man commits suicide - association with Kenja cult."

So that became now, so that you ask us the question, how do you relate somebody's suicide because they've been involved in Kenja? And that's the story. That began the press interest and it became the linchpin for the laying of charges ultimately against Ken, because those three girls who met Michael Beaver on that day at that deprogramming were three girls that Mutch was later to go down and - he didn't interview the three of them, he interviewed two girls.

The charges, the initial charges of Ken came from two families, two mothers who were best friends. Both mothers left Kenja under very serious circumstances. We asked them to leave. One girl was best friends with the daughter of the second family, right?

Out of Michael Beaver's suicide grew the big press attack, spearheaded by A Current Affair, Chris Smith, by Cult Awareness Network, by these three people, and the three girls who were present at that deprogramming, three sisters, they were three sisters, join with this other girl to bring charges against Ken. So it reads as if four girls are you know, alleging molestation against Ken. No, three of them were sisters, the other one was best friend with one of the sisters, and those three girls were present at this meeting that Martin Katchen had with Michael Beaver in Melbourne, and so we get the growth of the charges.

So Michael Beaver's suicide has served Cult Awareness very well, and the feelings of compassion for that mother who will never let her grief go, because she's been she's been fed and fed and fed again, and that woman even surfaces now - that same woman Wendy Beaver is even involved in in the circle of people in this current move against Ken.

You think these people care about Wendy Beaver, or her getting rid of her grief or being able to handle it? Because they've stuck her on a lie.

Narrator: In Beyond Our Ken, Melissa refused to show the truth about what happened to Michael Beaver, even though she knew and had seen documents proving Ken and Jan's version. These facts implicate the people trying to destroy Ken and Kenja - and who are still trying to do so through Melissa's documentary.

Jan: If you are communicating to or dealing with people who are very negative towards Kenja, you want to ask them one question, when did you become negative towards Kenja? And who had you communicated to before that happened? Because I can think probably of half a dozen people that may be there. If you knew the true history of those stories, those people, each one had had profound positive changes in their life, in their experience in Kenja. For where they were when they started and where they were at the end of it. The changes in their life were quite miraculous.

And the disaster was perhaps for them, when somebody started to implant in their head that what was wrong with them now was what happened back there.

Because when you're being fed, you know, Kenja is really bad, Kenja is doing this. And then you have to ask these people, hey, what sort of work did you do after you left Kenja? And who did you see? Did you do any counselling work with anybody? Did you do any hypnosis with anybody? Were you in fact deprogrammed? What actually worked? And when was the point after you left Kenja when you suddenly decided that this experience in this year of your life, which prior to that you thought was very positive, had been very negative?