Boycott This Play!

We should not support Social Therapy in any way.

Philadelphia Weekly/September 4, 2002
By Liz Spikol

It was a sure bet, but I still didn't expect it. I thought they might have retreated from their expansion into Philadelphia. I was wrong. Let me explain. Social Therapy has wormed its way into the Fringe Festival (albeit the Unfiltered Fringe) by using theater--once again--to lure people into their bizarre web of organizations. A web that is often characterized as a cult.

I first heard about Social Therapy--which is led by "charismatic leader" Fred Newman--in 1999 from a reader named R.A. Friedman, who wrote to tell me about his disturbing experience with a group therapy practice in Philadelphia.

He had been referred by a friend to the Philadelphia Center for Social Therapy. There he had a couple unpleasant sessions with the director of the center, Elizabeth Hechtman, who, Friedman says, was adversarial and demanding.

After he says he was urged to "get with the Fred Newman program," Friedman left the group. In his 1999 email to me, Friedman wrote, "One tactic is very clear: The group takes persons seeking help who are emotionally vulnerable and recruits them into their 'cause' under the guise of therapy."

I figured I'd better do some research.

What I found was that Fred Newman, the architect of this so-called therapy, does not have a degree in either psychology or psychiatry. And "treatment" frequently consists of working for Newman's various political and social organizations--mostly without pay.

In fact, Newman has been plagued by charges of using therapy practices as a recruiting tool for his political cult since the 1970s. One of the most disturbing things I read was from cult expert Frank Touchet, who said Social Therapy patients "have been criminally tampered with in the deepest fibers of their being."

In the following two years spent researching Social Therapy, I only became more disheartened.

One therapist I spoke with who has since left Social Therapy (and who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution) told me she was harshly reprimanded in front of a group for asking questions about Newman, who is compared by followers to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The therapist later learned that such group humiliation was not uncommon, and found herself devastated by an experience she compared to that of being in a cult.

The group began as the New Alliance Party in 1979, when Fred Newman joined forces with Chester native Lenora Fulani. They were extreme from the beginning. In 1985 a NAP delegation led by Fulani went to Tripoli to meet with Muammar Qaddafi and lament the U.S. bombing of Libya. You know, that sort of thing. Lenora Fulani ran for president in 1988--the same year the FBI called NAP "armed and dangerous."

Fulani used patients in Social Therapy practices to do much of her campaign work. An ex-NAP/Social Therapy member described her experience on the Fulani campaign trail in the press in the late '80s.

"Some people are fooled," she told cult expert Chip Berlet, "especially the uneducated or emotionally ill. They use them ... They don't care about people--they want numbers: more money, more people, more power."

In 1993 another ex-member told the New York City Sun that the "therapists" wanted people to join so they could be "slave laborers for Fred Newman." And they were fairly successful.

Newman and Fulani always reached for power via politics. By 1999 Lenora Fulani had allied herself with Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign--with Buchanan's blessing. It was easy to see why: Here was an African-American woman who repeatedly defended Buchanan against claims he was a racist.

And then there's the problem of NAP's anti-Semitism, which I first learned about from a lengthy Anti-Defamation League report called The New Alliance Party: A Cult by Any Other Name. Though Newman was born Jewish, he has said horrible things, such as, "The Jew, the dirty Jew, once the ultimate victim of capitalism's soul, fascism, would become a victimizer on behalf of capitalism." Newman's plays include No Room for Zion and Dead as a Jew.

As recently as May of this year, the American Jewish Committee accused a Newman/Fulani group of "being backed by anti-Semites," and asked funders like AT&T to consider not donating.

Now some of Newman and Fulani's organizations are being investigated by the New York attorney general's office for allegedly sharing funds between separate financial interests.

When I saw a postcard advertising a Fred Newman play as part of the Unfiltered Fringe, I was extremely upset. The Fringe Festival proper does not govern Unfiltered Fringe productions or condone the content. But many people who attend Fringe events don't really understand the distinction.

The play is called The Store: One Block East of Jerome and bills itself thus: "Thirty years after the sexual revolution, feminism meets striptease." It's a no-brainer for the Newmanites: Nudity will bring 'em in, and Fred Newman's manipulative philosophy will handle the seduction.

As an advocate for mental health, I must urge everyone attending the Fringe Festival to boycott this play. How can we support a group that uses therapy as a pretext to use and take advantage of people looking for help? It deeply saddens me that therapy remains one of the group's tactics. It is a great betrayal of trust.