James Slee
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| James Slee | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 |
| Died | August 14, 1983 Park Plaza Hotel, New Haven, Connecticut |
| Occupation | Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank, Middletown, Connecticut |
James Slee (1957 - August 14, 1983) was a young man who died during a session of Werner Erhard's Erhard Seminars Training. His family later sued Erhard Seminars Training, but the jury did not rule for damages to be delivered to the family. At the time of his death, Slee had been working at the Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank, in Middletown, Connecticut.
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[edit] Education
Slee had graduated from University of Connecticut in 1978, and he had been accepted to the University of Vermont to pursue his law degree.
[edit] Erhard Seminars Training
[edit] Enrollment & Registration
Slee's friends had been discussing Erhard Seminars Training programs with him, and he attended a guest seminar in New Haven, Connecticut, in May 1983. Slee paid[1] for the $50 deposit for the course in New York City, and later switched to the New Haven course in August. He paid for the remaining $375 tuition on June 11, 1983, with a Visa card.
[edit] Danger Process
Finkelstein et al. (1982) report on est's "Truth Process," an event occurring on the second day of the training. During this exercise trainees lie on the floor, eyes closed, meditating on an individual problem they have selected.
"At the trainer's command, the trainees imagine a situation in which that problem has occurred and systematically explore the detailed bodily sensations and images associated with the problem itself. As the trainer orders the trainees to examine images from the past and from childhood, powerful affects are released. The room is soon filled with the sound of sobbing, retching, and uncontrolled laughter, punctuated by the exclamations of those remonstrating with figures from their past... Later in the second day, during the so-called "Danger Process,” trainees come to the dais in groups of 25 and stand facing the audience. The trainer exhorts those on the dais to "be" themselves, and reprimands those who appear to be posturing or falsely smiling, or who fail to make eye contact with the seated trainees. It is not uncommon, apparently, for trainees to faint or cry when called to the dais in this fashion, and some later recount that they found the experience liberated them from social anxieties."[2]
[edit] August 14, 1983, Incident
Jack Slee died on August 14, 1983, while standing on the stage of the Park Plaza Hotel's Grand Ballroom in New Haven, Connecticut. When the first responders arrived in the form of the New Haven fire rescue squad, the firefighters were initially prevented from entering the ballroom to treat Slee:
A New Haven fire emergency squad was the first to arrive on the scene, having been called by someone in the training. But when the first two fire fighters got to the ballroom entrance, they were held up by one of the assistants guarding the doors. One fire fighter asked whether anyone inside needed medical attention. The assistant turned her head back toward the door, peering inside for a moment, and then turned back to the two men. "No, not yet," she told them. After another moment or two, the fire fighters brushed past the door guard and made their way to the stage where Slee still lay. Minutes later two more fire fighters arrived along with an ambulance crew of paramedics that had been dispatched to the hotel...the paramedics tried to revive Slee, but then...the ominous flat tone on the portable heart monitor they had set down beside the stricken man. No heartbeat. No vital signs. [3].
The est trainer, David Norris, later asked all of the Erhard Seminars Training participants:
to consider the possibility that Jack Slee might have "willed his own death."[4].
Jack Slee was officially declared dead at 1:03 A.M., August 14, 1983:
An hour later, at 1:03 A.M., doctors at Yale-New Haven Hospital pronounced Jack Slee dead of "undetermined causes." A subsequent autopsy report, following a more extensive medical examination of Slee's body, could shed no further light on the cause of death. However, the Connecticut state medical examiner's office, in its autopsy report issued in November 1983, found that stress might have caused Slee's death. "Available history," read part of the autopsy report, "indicates that Mr. Slee collapsed in a situation in which high emotional stress could be expected. Such emotional stress may have neural and hormonal effects which are deleterious to cardiac rhythm..." [5].
[edit] Official Est Statements
Dr. Jack Mantos, Erhard Seminars Training's Director of Research released a public statement :
In San Francisco, est officials for the moment had little interest in taking credit for the man's death. Instead, they hastened to disclaim any responsibility for Slee's death that night in New Haven. A statement issued within days of the incident from Jack Mantos, est's director of research and a Harvard-trained medical doctor, insisted that the training had nothing to do with Slee's fatal collapse.
"In any large group of people, medical emergencies do arise from time to time and this appears to be one of those...Although medical authorities have not yet determined what caused Mr. Slee's death, it is evident that the est training could not have had anything to do with it."[6]
Est Trainer and former NASA medical doctor, Dr. Jerry Joiner made some statements to other est trainer staff:
A month after Slee's death, a fifty-eight-year-old man collapsed and died from a heart attack while undergoing est's rigorous six-day advanced training course in New York. Coming so quickly on the heels of the New Haven incident, the New York death made staff members understandably edgy when the subject of it came up in a San Francisco staff meeting. Est trainer Jerry Joiner, a medical doctor who had once worked for NASA, sought to put everyone at ease by playing down the significance of such a tragic incident occurring during any kind of est program.
While reminding staffers of the precautions taken by the company for the safety of the more than 1,000 people attending est trainings and other Erhard programs each week, Joiner mentioned that some people die while shopping or on the street, while others could die while attending one of the company's programs. Joiner admonished the staff against blowing up the significance of the fatality in the six-day course. "That's what's going to ruin things...People are going to die from time to time in the courses we do."[7]
[edit] 1984, Lawsuit filed
A lawsuit was filed by Slee's family in 1984. The jury did find that Werner Erhard and Erhard Seminars Training were negligent, but did not award any damages to Slee's family:
A year after Slee's death, his family filed a $5 million lawsuit claiming that est was directly responsible for the tragic events that August night at the Park Plaza Hotel. Nine years after his death, the case finally went before a federal jury in Connecticut. In October 1992 the jury ruled that Werner Erhard and his company had been negligent and were responsible for inflicting severe emotional distress on Jack Slee. But the jury found that the est training itself did not "proximately cause" Slee's death.[8]
[edit] References
- ^ Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal: The dark journey of Werner Erhard from est to exile. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. ISBN 0-312-09296-2, Page. 205.
- ^ Report of the APA Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Techniques of Persuasion and Control, November 1986, Margaret Thaler Singer, University of California, Berkeley; Harold Goldstein, National Institute of Mental Health; Michael Langone, American Family Foundation; Jesse S. Miller, San Francisco, California; Maurice K. Temerlin, Clinical Psychology Consultants, Inc.; Louis J. West, University of California, Los Angeles
- ^ Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal, Page 207.
- ^ Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal, Page 208.
- ^ Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal, Page 208.
- ^ Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal, P.209.
- ^ Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal, P. 210.
- ^ Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal, Page 210.
