Trust Betrayed: The Fall of Sound Doctrine Church and Winepress Publishing

0:00 Speaker 1: As with the shot-out windows, graffiti, death threats, harassment, property damage, assault and other crimes committed against Sound Doctrine Church members, enumclaw Police did nothing.

0:12 Speaker 1: During this highly turbulent and stressful time, jezebel was able to contact some employees of the company and attempt to scare them into quitting from Winepress.

0:20 Speaker 1: To help hasten the demise of the company, one individual unhappy about Winepress' financial situation decided to join hands with Jezebel and, in similar fashion, chose to start causing trouble for the employees that remained.

0:34 Speaker 1: This individual we refer to as Cora.

0:37 Speaker 1: As it would turn out, however, causing problems was far from the limits of what Cora was willing to do in his betrayal of others who worked at the company.

0:47 Speaker 1: Just to provide a bit of context, keep in mind that many of the individuals still working at Winepress at this time considered themselves tightly-knit church family, not mere co-workers, and this particular stretch of time was one of the most stressful, painful and turbulent times of their lives.

1:05 Speaker 1: It would be like being in a foxhole with men you've spent years training and fighting with, only to have one abandon his company and start fighting for the adversary.

1:14 Speaker 1: This betrayal only added to the stress of the employees who were working overtime in an attempt to help get authors all of their files should the seemingly inevitable take place the end of Wine Press Publishing.

1:26 Speaker 1: Cora's actions didn't stop at causing trouble for the accounting department.

1:30 Speaker 1: He eventually announced his intention to resign from the company and, as a member of the IT department, he was tasked with passing off instructions for managing the company's servers, passwords and data.

1:41 Speaker 1: In meetings with employees trying to take over his responsibilities, he purposely typed out vague and confusing instructions and left condescending remarks insinuating that those taking over his responsibilities were underqualified.

1:56 Speaker 1: Despite a number of time-wasting meetings with Cora, employees from other departments were able to easily take over his duties in addition to their own.

2:04 Speaker 1: While undertaking these duties, and after Cora was no longer with the company, one employee was working to get the author's domain names switched over from being registered to Winepress and changed them to be under the author's name to ensure they maintained access to their domain.

2:18 Speaker 1: In the events, winepress closed its doors.

2:20 Speaker 1: During this process, an employee discovered that Cora had begun the process of stealing these authors' domains.

2:28 Speaker 1: Seeing that he was a former member of the IT department, he had passwords to all company servers and services, which he chose to retain access to upon his exit of the company.

2:38 Speaker 1: He then proceeded to change the domain registration information from Winepress or the author who owned it to his own name and an address that would later be discovered to be an alternate business.

2:50 Speaker 1: As it would turn out, this was only the beginning of a larger plan that would unfold in the coming weeks, and this was only the very tip of the iceberg needed for Jezebel to begin her new company.

3:07 Speaker 1: As if the coordination and obvious corruption throughout this situation were not enough, on the articles of incorporation for the business, the false accuser's mother, delilah, was listed as the registered agent on this freshly established publishing company.

3:22 Speaker 1: This company was under a new name, of course.

3:25 Speaker 1: However, it was started with all of the book files dozens of Winepress employees had strived for decades to create.

3:33 Speaker 1: In spite of the incompetence and undermining, jezebel had put in their way work which she was all too happy to take credit for.

3:40 Speaker 1: Dozens of hardworking employees had just lost their jobs as a direct result of Jezebel's actions, and she was awarded all the fruits of their labor free of any charge, by Enumclaw City Attorney Mike Reynolds, along with the Enumclaw Police Department.

3:56 Speaker 1: After stealing all of their work, jezebel celebrated by doing a grand opening complete with a ribbon cutting.

4:02 Speaker 1: This was strikingly similar to the grand opening Wayne Press and the Salt Shaker had done years previous.

4:09 Speaker 1: But this is very much in character for who Jezebel was and is.

4:13 Speaker 1: She can create nothing new or original and she does not have a single creative bone in her body.

4:20 Speaker 1: Instead, she can only lie, steal and manipulate until she ends up with a hollow husk of what talented, creative, hardworking individuals had made before her.

4:30 Speaker 1: Nevertheless, jezebel's original statement that she found the Christian marketplace to be gullible ended up being even more true than perhaps even she realized.

4:40 Speaker 1: As such, a number of former Winepress authors did trust Jezebel with their books, allowing her to take their book files and replace the Winepress logo with her new imprint.

4:50 Speaker 1: To this day, there yet remain a number of books sporting the book cover, typesetting and editing done by the Winepress team sitting on her poorly designed website.

5:00 Speaker 1: Sometime later, a number of industry professionals were asked to do an estimate based upon the number of author files that were stolen, the applicable services done to build their book files things like book cover design, editing and typesetting and the estimated total came out to approximately three million dollars in stolen assets.

5:23 Speaker 1: As Wine Press finally came to a close, former employees of the company and members of Sound Doctrine Church had little recourse within the city of Enumclaw.

5:31 Speaker 1: This had to do in large part because reporting a theft to police would have little effect if the person enabling the entire situation was the city's own prosecutor.

5:40 Speaker 1: And police were fully committed to helping Jezebel get away with as many crimes as she wished.

5:46 Speaker 1: Helping Jezebel get away with as many crimes as she wished.

5:47 Speaker 1: These individuals had just had their livelihood destroyed, church shut down and positive influence in the community removed, all because the corruption within Enumclaw protected Jezebel and Detective McCall's hatred against a church that did nothing but try to serve the community of Enumclaw.

6:03 Speaker 1: And with that, the days that followed marked the official end of Wine Press Publishing.

6:08 Speaker 1: Former employees were now left to find other employment but, far worse, had to watch as a con artist successfully stole over a decade of their hard work, creativity and service, all done in spite of the very person who stole it.

6:22 Speaker 1: Now, up to this point we've covered quite a bit in this series and I know it may seem unbelievable the sheer number of people that contributed to the demise of the Salt Shaker Notation Printing and Winepress Publishing.

6:34 Speaker 1: We've talked about Enumclaw Police Detective Grant McCall fabricating allegations against the church pastor who also served in Winepress' management.

6:43 Speaker 1: We've covered Jezebel and Cora stealing the company under the protection of the city attorney and the police department, all while dozens, or even hundreds of customers or even friends shrugged their shoulders and remained silent.

6:56 Speaker 1: But if you know your Bible, you would know that this is the exact same thing that happened to Christ himself when he was under trial.

7:04 Speaker 1: His very closest friends remained silent in the face of injustice, and others who had no particular bone to pick in that fight spoke up to yell, crucify him, even in spite of being offered Barabbas a thief in his place.

7:17 Speaker 1: In the very same way, enumclaw's government and community were all too happy to side with a charity-conning swindler over a group of individuals whose only goal had been to live a quiet life and to serve the community in as many capacities as possible.

7:34 Speaker 1: That being said, for a deeper dive into this and into the full gospel, I highly recommend you check out and listen to the Consider podcast.

7:41 Speaker 1: The very same whole gospel taught and practiced at Sound Doctrine Church.

7:46 Speaker 1: Same whole gospel taught and practiced at Sound Doctrine Church.

7:50 Speaker 1: Now, with as outlandish as this story sounds, however, it is not the end.

7:52 Speaker 1: There is yet another chapter that is arguably more absurd, astounding and corrupt than anything we've covered thus far.

7:59 Speaker 1: In the next episode we'll cover the trial between King County and Sound Doctrine Church.

8:04 Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us in this series and I will see you in the next episode of Enumclaw.

8:11 Speaker 1: Thank you.