Dear Ms Stein

I write this as an open letter to you in relation to your public comments about Lighthouse International Group and your endorsements of a highly (and provably) libellous article written about our company and former Chairman Paul Waugh in the Daily Mail on 20th April 2022. For your awareness, everything you are about to read here will also be published online as an open letter that’s in many ways applicable to all cult ‘specialists’ and/or ‘experts’ in relation to these matters. Specifically I am referring to comments and broadcasts in the media endorsing unresearched malignantly malevolent individuals currently waging an illegal smear campaign against us as a company, as a community, as human beings and as people with families and children. They are manipulatively and falsely portraying themselves as victims through fantastical stories that have no truth, evidence or proof to back up any of their accusations and statements, whatsoever. 

I wish to focus particularly on a comment you made on Twitter (shown below), saying you felt the Daily Mail “did a good job with [their] investigation” into this article. In addition, I also refer to a broadcast on River Radio you recently did with journalist Rani Singh, a mother who has systematically abused her two sons (now in their 30’s) here at Lighthouse since they were boys and is trying to detract from this by irresponsibly, falsely and maliciously labelling our company a cult. This is along with several other malignantly toxic individuals obsessed with trying to destroy Mr Waugh and Lighthouse International, our families and our children. In this particular irresponsible and highly unprofessional tweet you have accused us of being in ‘denial’ of our imagined wrongdoing, as well as attacking and demonising those accusing us, while playing the victim ourselves and ‘ranting contradictions’. 

Ms Stein, on what basis can you legitimately make such statements and pursue actions that endorse such individuals, given you have never met or spoken to Mr Waugh, nor taken up his open invitation to meet in person with you or any of your fellow cult ‘specialists’ and/or ‘experts’? Something that’s entirely unscholarly to say the least. Neither have you contacted anyone else currently at Lighthouse and neither have you ever been involved in any of our work? So how can we be anything more than a caricatured figment of your imagination when your conclusions are based entirely on secondary hearsay rather than anything first hand and real? 

We have received no legitimate inquiry or questions that would constitute any attempt at any legitimate discovery from you. Perhaps you have much more of a vested interest in believing we are a cult as a means of furthering your career, rather than a healthy community (which is what we are) under attack by malignantly toxic individuals? Do you have a vested interest in getting other people to believe we and other healthy communities are cults? Is that more important to you than doing an objective assessment and finding out what the reality is? Do you and your peers so desperately need healthy communities to be labelled as cults in order to keep you in work and to gain more opportunities as a result of that? What is your interest here? 

You clearly haven’t wanted to question and genuinely scrutinise your sources to find the many holes in their stories. If you had, you would have wanted to speak to us and hear the other side of this to get to the truth. Yet you’ve confidently made defamatory public comments and statements about Mr Waugh and our company, lending your name and reputation to our accusers based purely on their hearsay. This leaves your reputation open to now be legitimately questioned for legitimate reasons, something that would not be happening if you had gone about this in a much more ethical, moral and professional manner. We are surprised, not just based on your credentials, but on your age and experience in life that you haven’t learned to do this by now. 

If you are willing to do the adequate discovery into us and meet the people here without prejudice, you will find we are far from being any kind of cult or ‘coercive control’ group. In fact we happen to know that private detectives have covertly gotten involved with us in the past, including members of the press and members of families, seeking to prove that we are a ‘cult’, but have come away each time with nothing at all to show that’s the case, in fact the opposite. To aid you in your discovery Mr Waugh is offering to personally invest in the financial costs of this process for you, to make it as easy and straightforward as possible. He is also in the process of inviting many more academics and specialists to speak with him on this and has announced that publicly on Twitter.

Assuming your concerns for people involved in dangerous and destructive cults are genuine, we invite you to sit down in person with Mr Waugh in a filmed discussion about the Daily Mail, its accusations against him and Lighthouse, along with your evidence you’ve based your comments on. The aim would be to both discuss this, learn from the experience and publicly get to the absolute truth of the matter, as well as to define the differences between cults and healthy communities. We would very much like to hear how you define this difference and what work you are doing in particular to help foster and develop more healthy communities. 

We challenge you to find any existing or past dangerous cult or coercive control group that has gone about handling a situation like this in the way we have, so publicly and openly. In fact yourself and others among your peers writing about us online, have acted far more secretively and with seemingly much more to hide, just like cults, than we have. However, if there is anything about Mr Waugh, Lighthouse as a company, its practices, or any of our people that we have missed that is in any way ‘cult-like’, or even in danger of becoming so, then we wish to know about this in detail so that swift and necessary changes can be made to reform in those areas. As any regenerate individual, group or company, like us, would surely want to do. Or would that be killing your future business opportunities concerning us?

We have extensive material evidence that categorically disproves every serious accusation made in the Daily Mail, which we cannot publicly release to the press yet, due to data protection legislation. We can and will do so eventually, either with the permission of their sources (who, by denying such a request, only discredit themselves) or through the courts. So sooner or later you will come to see the errors you’ve unfortunately made here. Beyond that, there is also our self-evident lack of secrecy and the fact that no one here is hiding their real names or identities. Everyone at Lighthouse regularly posts online using their public accounts and we are all open to meeting and speaking with you and others like you. Doesn’t this already strike you as very ‘uncult-like’? 

Compare our openness and desire to have a candid discourse with the behaviour of our assailants and accusers who, apart from those few who put their names in the Daily Mail, have nearly all hidden their true names and identities behind pseudonyms while posting thousands of persistent libellous statements against us online. To a person these people have refused to partake in any kind of open, reasonable and mature discussion, debate or arbitration with us and despite the constant and public offers from us to do so. Nor have they taken any legal action against us, despite our encouragement and many repeated calls for them to do so, in order to settle the matter legally, honourably and gracefully in court. 

Those unlawfully smearing and trying to sabotage us are known malignantly toxic family members, disgruntled and resentful ex-clients with groundless financial disputes, or who are bitter because of an unrequited romantic interest here. They have no interest in anything other than trying to destroy our reputations, our lives and our livelihoods, our families and the wellbeing and safety of our children as much as possible. They would certainly not be pleased or relieved for anyone to assess and officially confirm Lighthouse International Group is not a cult. In fact, they would be bitterly disappointed at such news because of their hatred and agenda and they don’t want that to be discovered. 

These people have an absolute vested interest in their falsehoods being true and for us to be somehow held accountable to these falsehoods, even though they aren’t true. Because of this they mock, scorn and literally dogpile, gag, try to frighten and persecute anyone expressing positive views about Lighthouse and their good experiences here. They have between them created thousands of defamatory, vile, racist, bigoted and profane posts in a dedicated anti-Lighthouse forum that are all but completely negative, while hidden cowardly behind anonymity. Something that has seemingly been completely missed by yourself and the likes of you Ms Stein. If there is any cult involved here it is those attacking us, their online cult and the ringleaders you’re now complicit with and supporting; including their physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual and sexual abuses. People and families don’t need to be part of a cult to be dangerous and for you to support such dangerous and abusive people and families, cult or no cult, is a very dangerous business for you to be in. 

Whether you were aware of this before or not, you have either been duped or been wilfully complicit in these malignantly toxic family members and their co-conspirators’ constructive sabotage of our lives and business through their narcissistic smear campaign. Either way, you are associating with people we can prove to have highly malevolent and vindictive histories as well as present actions and motives towards Paul Waugh, Lighthouse International and its people for reasons very far from noble or good. Any comment or association with these people will certainly age very badly, as it already is and significantly, as well as seriously harm your future career and legacy. As already stated, you’re now in public collaboration with Rani Singh, a mother who has inflicted life-long abuse on her sons and a Mr Jon Breen, who has displayed frighteningly obsessive and pathological behaviour towards Mr Waugh and Lighthouse online. Mr Breen, who operates online as @Educofirebird (Twitter) and u/throwawayeducovictim (Reddit) amongst others, has also (like you) never met anyone at Lighthouse. He is purported to be a pathological stalker who’s online behaviour aligns with this. He alone is personally responsible for over 1,500 maliciously false posts about Mr Waugh and Lighthouse across various platforms. To compound this, there is a very concerning website we were sent about Mr Breen by someone else who has apparently also been obsessively attacked by him; www.JonBreen.info. 

Mr Breen and Ms Singh represent exactly the pathology in people that those at Lighthouse, like Ms Singh’s sons, are trying to get away from in order to overcome and heal from the damage and traumas of the past they’ve suffered. Are you and your fellow ‘experts’ or ‘specialists’ not interested in speaking to them and listening to their accounts as well? Why is what happened to them so easy to dismiss and on what basis is that not gaslighting? The testimonies of these brothers and many others with them were completely snubbed by the Daily Mail in the information we submitted to them before the article that’s now been categorically and comprehensively debunked in our dedicated website lighthouseinternationalgroupdailymail.com. 

We’re currently demanding 45 main points and 154 sub points of evidence from the Mail in regards to their article, which they are yet to provide reasonable and tangible proof for at all, despite them coming back to us saying they’re trying their best. They will not find it though because it does not exist. You cannot find evidence for what is false unless it’s contrived. Ms Stein, you said the Daily Mail have done a ‘good job’ investigating us but what evidence of an investigation do you have? Please show us any proof of that investigation because such an investigation would have legitimate facts, facts that are true and real. The Daily Mail have no such evidence precisely because they have done no ‘investigation’. Their article is purely ‘he said / she said’ trashy journalism. There is no investigation here and if you have any proof of that, in the public interest, to show that such an investigation has been done and the facts portrayed are indeed a result of that investigation, then please let us know. But we know there will be more silence here by virtue of the fact there was none.

It’s wonderful that, despite having suffered directly at the hands of an abusive cult yourself, you have wanted to use your experience to help and support others who have and are being abused, coerced and manipulated by similar individuals and groups. We greatly encourage and support such work. However to equate our company and us as people, as families with children, who are a completely open book with the kinds of groups you’ve mentioned in podcasts, such as the ‘Children of God’ cult, is mind-blowingly unfounded, ungrounded, libellous, defamatory and amateurish to the extent it calls your own character into question. Ms Stein, either you are a career opportunist with a vested interest in the prospect of a new ‘cult’ being on the scene, no matter how imagined and false that is, because it presents a lucrative opportunity for professional profit and recognition, or you have genuinely made a mistake and been terribly deceived. We urge you to have the humility to admit where you have got things wrong here and take us up on our invitation to meet.

Should you choose not to engage in an open, honest and civil conversation with us, even with Mr Waugh’s investment and support, we must ask you to retract and renounce any and all comments and statements you have made against Mr Waugh and Lighthouse International, pending this matter being settled in court or otherwise. Along with this to publicly apologise for having deliberately tarnished our reputations and damaged our livelihoods and the security of our families and children. Failing to do this will unfortunately leave us no option but to start the process of holding you legally and publicly accountable for libel and defamation, with the appropriate damages your irresponsible statements have made directly and contributed to through others.

With regards, 

Chris Nash

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