Robert Dam was a burglar and a thief before he became a Scientologist

Dam was introduced to Scientology in March 1984, when he was 20.

What Dam did not disclose to the Church at the time was that he was already an inveterate criminal, with a long trail of unreported and unpunished crimes behind him, mainly break-ins and robberies.

According to a later writeup by Dam, he admitted that in a series of burglaries he and his cohorts netted between 34,367 kr and 48,114 kr in stolen goods.

After joining Church staff, Dam finally admitted to having undisclosed crimes for which he was still culpable

Dam signed up for staff and worked at the Church of Scientology Denmark for over a year before he was in trouble again. When efforts were made to help him live more ethically, only then was it discovered that he was covering up a criminal past before Scientology, and Church officials demanded he take responsibility for his crimes.

Dam turned himself in to the police and was tried for his crimes, found guilty but let off with two years’ probation, due in no small part to his promise to the court to continue his charitable work for the Church of Scientology.

Dam, however, continued to commit violations of Scientology Ethics Codes. By the beginning of 1987, he had quit and walked off the job.

As a print broker for the Church, Dam overcharged, reaping exorbitant profits—until his ripoffs were discovered and he was sacked

In 1991, Dam worked at a printing company that handled Church mailings at a reduced cost by printing in Malaysia. When that company folded, Dam seized the opportunity to establish his own one-man business—United Print & Mail (UPM)—with the Church as virtually his only client.

Dam moved his operations to Zimbabwe, because, he said, it was less costly to mail from Africa into Europe than within Europe. And others observed that it was easier to evade taxes there too.

Directing the fulfillment of the Danish Church’s extensive printing and mailing needs, as well as those of one or more Churches in Britain, Dam profited handsomely—as evidenced by his purchase in 1995 of a terraced house in the Valby section of Copenhagen, a big step up from his small flat in Osterbro.

But it was soon discovered that Dam was a) overcharging the Church for printing and mailing, b) producing low-quality printings that had to be caught by others, c) making as much as four times the profit he reported to Church officials, and d) tampering with postage to reduce cost and further jack up profits, resulting at times in thousands of magazines not mailed but sent back from Europe to the printing house and destroyed.

Other reports surfaced of Dam’s blatant bad faith. A Church official contacted the Zimbabwe printing company directly and was quoted considerably lower prices for printing than Dam was charging the Church. Unpaid bills from 1996 from a transport company and the printing company in Zimbabwe were received by the Church.

And there were his conflicting—and false—profit reports. In just one example, a review of the “markup” (the amount added to cost of goods to cover overhead and profit) for a British publication printing was found to be 47 percent. Dam had reported he was making a 7-10 percent profit. To admit to any of this dishonesty would result, Dam knew, in his being fired and the end of his racket.

When confronted with the evidence at the end of 1996, however, Dam had no choice but to pay back the Church 180,000 Danish kr.

In a legal affidavit signed and notarized on January 21, 1997, Dam admitted that he had “been involved in the printing of these materials for the wrong reason, which was to make a personal profit as opposed to assisting the Church in its expansion activities.”

He also noted specific examples, including attempting to set up printers who would secretly pay him a 10 percent kickback for every Church job they did. “This gives an indication as to my general intentions as regards making money off the Church,” he swore in his affidavit.

How much he really got away with over those years when he ran his printing operation far from Denmark may never be known. But what is not in question is that he could not be trusted and that his self-serving and greedy intention was solely to profit as much as possible from the Church.

Robert Dam had killed the Golden Goose and UPM closed its doors for good.

A business owner accused Dam of intellectual property theft and illegally profiting from an “imitation” of her product

For a while, Dam seemed contrite, content to be a member and move on. But it soon became apparent he had not changed at all.

While still ostensibly working his way back into good graces after his swindle as print broker for the Denmark Church, Robert Dam was implicated in yet another business swindle.

In 1998, Dam was accused by the owner of an IT research company of stealing an intellectual property (a retail research system) and forming a competing business to market an “imitation” version of the concept.

Dam convinced his brother—who had worked for the IT company—to use what he had learned there to craft a replica of the product to sell by Dam’s new corporation, Analysegruppen. When challenged by the company owner, Dam spread false information about the woman and her company, refuting her claims and refusing efforts to mediate.

The IT company lost sales as a result of Dam’s chicanery and eventually went out of business.

Dam, however, never looked back.

After driving his printing company into bankruptcy, Dam illegally shifted its assets over to his wife’s business

A year earlier, Dam had established a printing company with an associate, Finn Jessen. According to Jessen, Dam mismanaged the company finances, while continuing to overspend on expenses, including his own substantial salary, assuring Jessen that the money was under control. In fact, the accountant was repeatedly warning Dam that drastic action was needed to salvage the company.

By 1999, the company was on the rocks and Dam filed for bankruptcy later that year.

Dam re-spun the story for visitors to his website in a 2016 semi-biographical essay: “The bankruptcy had thrown me into a deep crisis. My life…in Scientology had collapsed when I was hanged as a fraud, accused of defrauding [the Church] out of millions of kroner….”

“Now I was personally bankrupt, a declared loser….my defeat was a fact, publicly on top of that. There was no hiding. I had ended up in a place I didn’t know, total failure.”

Aside from his well-earned status as a conman ripping off the Church, the rest of his essay was a pretense, a performance setting the stage for how he “rose from the ashes.”

What Dam did not disclose is that he intentionally entered into that bankruptcy as an escape from the consequences of his mismanagement and profiting at the company’s expense. The bankruptcy allowed him to jump ship, assets in tow, leaving all the debts to Jessen, his partner.

“During 1999, we started negotiations to sell the company,” explained Jessen. “We received an offer of 1.5 million kr, which would have been enough to pay all the debts in the company, but Robert said no…. Instead, Robert negotiated a sale with [a corporate raider interested in failed companies]. So after our company was declared bankrupt in 1999, it was sold for next to nothing, allowing the buyer to scoop up the assets cheaply. Robert subsequently became second in command of that company.”

Even before the sale, Dam had started to illegally move clients from his failing company to a business owned by his wife, essentially running away with assets that were supposed to be used to handle his company’s liabilities.

“I confronted Robert with what I had found out from our lawyer,” said Jessen. “At first, Robert said he could see nothing wrong with it, but when the lawyer then explained to him that what he was planning was so criminal that Robert could risk a prison sentence, he agreed to stop this practice.”

Dam stopped but also spitefully severed ties with his partner and Jessen doesn’t know to this day if Dam ever handled his portion of the 2.2 million kr debt. Jessen, on the other hand, was left to spend the next 11 years paying off debts caused by Dam’s mismanagement.

Dam had burned all financial bridges to the Scientology community, but discovered he could still profit by attacking the Church

In the wake of his apparent business meltdowns, the Church again offered to help Dam become honest and straighten out his life.

But rather than cooperate, by 2003 Dam had covertly connected up with a splinter group of anti-Scientologists, bent on spreading disinformation and trying to create dissension within the ranks of active members.

For Dam, this included creating an internet hate site from which to spread further venom about his former religion.

In doing this, he accomplished certain personal objectives.

First, notoriety. The anti-Scientology attacks Dam and his cohorts orchestrated were expressly calculated to attract ravening news reporters seeking controversial topics and “sources” with salacious claims.

Second, remuneration. Media outlets escalated their Scientology coverage with sensationalized media pieces that attracted attention-hungry politicians or officials seeking controversies to latch on to and “investigate” or to target with an “inquiry.”

This would in turn generate even more media interest and paid arrangements for “sources” like Dam who were eagerly available to peddle their false narratives.

Dam forwarded blatant false reports to the Education Ministry about his daughter’s school, in a vengeful bid to stir up trouble

In 2004, one of Dam’s daughters was attending a well-known school known for its use of Study Technology developed by L. Ron Hubbard.

In April of that year, Dam wrote to the Minister of Education falsely claiming he was forced to take his daughter out of the school because she was being harassed.

Ten months later, in February 2005, Dam wrote to the education minister again with a new story, falsely claiming that after he chose to leave Scientology, he was told to find another school for his daughter.

What was the truth?

Dam had attended the school’s parent consultant day and announced that he was happy with his daughter’s progress. He then approached his daughter’s teacher (who was a Scientologist) and showed her his resignation letter from the Church. The teacher told him that he should be talking to a Church official, not her, but told him his resignation did not affect his daughter’s status and said she would never recommend that his daughter should be deregistered.

In a follow-up letter to the teacher, Dam formally withdrew his daughter from the school stating that the family was “moving to another municipality.” He added that he and his wife “would like to thank you for an incredibly good collaboration—we have been very happy to have [our daughter] going to Kildeskolen.”

As Hans Juel, an associate of Dam’s for years, observed: “I think that instead of listening to Robert Dam, people [meaning the media] should approach directly…the institutions that work diligently with children on a daily basis—and do so with brilliant results. Anything else is bad press.”

Extortion attempt: Dam threatened to launch a massive cyberattack against the Church if he was not paid 797,000 kr

In December 2004, Dam sent a letter to a representative of the Danish Church of Scientology demanding payment of more than 797,000 kr.

Then he made his criminal intent clear: Pay the money and he would stop attacking the Church in the press and through his lawyer.

The Church refused.

Dam then escalated his extortion threats. In March 2005, and again in May 2005, he repeated his demands, adding that he would go to authorities if they were not met. Again, he was rebuffed.

In October 2005, he announced a plan for a “large scale online campaign” to harass the Church membership. This time, his threat included sending out 35 million negative emails worldwide. Dam promised he would persist until he received “the completely reasonable monetary compensation I demand.”

In January 2006, Dam sent a letter announcing a collective plan to launch a class-action lawsuit on behalf of himself and other excommunicated Scientologists, demanding return of all past donations. With his flair for the ludicrous, Dam stated that the suit planning had been prepared and forwarded to a safe location. From there, the plan would be launched automatically “should anything happen to me. Nobody but me personally can stop that.”

His demands continued, becoming more and more strident, all to no avail.

Dam’s stream of falsehoods/lies have been debunked by the Church and an outraged former associate with a website

Hans Juel, a longstanding member of the Scientology community, was well acquainted with Dam’s sordid history and disgusted by his distortions of that history in its many retellings.

In 2011, Juel took it upon himself to create a website about Robert Dam to correct the false narrative and lies Dam had been laying down for several years.

“It must be said that I know Robert Dam quite well from the time he joined the Church…and through his business career,” said Juel on his website.

“Robert Dam wants to explain to the world how badly he has been treated…But it struck me that an incredible amount of old gossip about the Church had crept in…which I have heard over and over again over time…in abundance on the Internet. I did what Robert Dam should have done—researched the sources. It suits both historians and journalists. So I went to the Church of Scientology and asked what was true and what was false in all this,” Juel said.

“Of course, both Robert Dam and I know that much of what he [publishes] from the Internet does not hold water….

“[At the Church] they also knew the stories and lifted one document after another out of the drawer….If the documents I have been presented with by the Church of Scientology are correct—and I have no doubt they are—it is clear that Robert Dam’s [story] is an attempt to rewrite history, in a completely Stalinist way by taking totally uncritically any rumor that ever circulated about the Church, pull it out of the hat, dust it off, and print it again,” observed Juel.

“The distorted facts, or outright lies for that matter, do not gain truth from being reprinted.”

“It also occurred to me,” noted Juel, “that Robert Dam’s own history has been subjected to a rebirth with apparently only sporadic recall of the past, so that the reality I remember has been manipulated, or let’s call it ‘adapted’ to his current purposes.

“My website is not intended as revenge, it is simply an attempt to show a slightly more nuanced picture of the defector Robert Dam.”

The fact remains that Dam’s motivations never changed through it all.

Or as Juel put it: “Robert ended up where he started, with the same basic attitude he entered the religion with. Before he became a Scientologist, he was a criminal—enough to get a suspended sentence of two years.

“Robert thought he could buy his way to freedom and then make a profit on his dealings with the church and its members…but some people are fundamentally unable to stay ethical in their dealings with life’s relationships to allow Scientology to work for them.

“Therefore, Robert never managed to find what he came for. And he now has to claim that no one else has either.”

Dam, an antisocial parasite feeding on the good name of Scientology, is enabled by Christian Daily and other biased platforms

Throughout his long career of business fraud, attempted extortion and unabated hate speech, Robert Dam found only a few willing to forward his lies—principally the Danish publishing outlet Christian Daily. The media company has a history of putting out misleading stories about Scientology, so giving Dam a broad outlet for his manufactured stories was a natural outgrowth of their existing antireligious bias.

Perhaps Dam hoped an alliance with the media would provide further fuel for his “pay up and I’ll stop lying” extortion strategy, but it did not.

Since then, he has continued to spread the same malicious tales, but with more and more embellishment. His most recent offering consists of stories from several unnamed sources that Dam cobbles into the fictional portrait of a “former Scientologist” who never existed.

It’s a premise that agrees with reality in only one way—the fictional portrait of Scientology that Dam foists off on the public never existed either.

The Cadets: Dam’s vicious false claims about children raised in the Sea Organization are dispelled by the same kids now grown

Dam, at the behest of greedy media seeking a new Scientology angle to replace their old and disproven rubbish, now falsely portrays the lives of children of parents who are part of the Sea Organization in Copenhagen.

It is a subject Dam knows nothing about and is drumming up solely to make money.

In telling this fairy tale, Dam relies on fictitious characters to forward his fictitious claims. All of which is handily disproven by the compelling testimony of real children, now adults, who grew up in the Sea Organization in Copenhagen. Their experiences expose the extent of fraudulence in Dam’s fabricated accounts.

In videotaped interviews and letters, these individuals describe their education—learning mathematics, reading, geography, science, biology and languages including English, German, French and Danish. They regularly engaged in sports activities—swimming, roller skating, baseball, basketball and volleyball. They went on outings— cultural excursions, museums, mountain climbing. They went camping, canoeing and sailing.

And unlike the experience of most Danish schoolchildren, there were no drugs in the schools they attended.

They spent time with their parents and had loving relationships with them.

They described the environment as clean and neat, friendly and not crowded. They ate nutritious meals. They had clean living quarters which they contributed to by doing small chores.

Each of them tell of learning values that have influenced their lives to this day—the importance of caring about people, helping those around them, respecting the religious beliefs of others, building relationships, and standing up for individual rights.

They were taught high moral standards and learned to be responsible for themselves and others because of what they learned being raised in the Sea Organization.

These are lessons Robert Dam could have availed himself of when he was in the Church, values and standards he knew of but never embraced.

As a result, Dam remains today what he always was—a criminal and a conman interested only in schemes to enrich himself at the expense of others.