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The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church is a $22 billion cult using a bogus claim over a cartoon kookaburra to silence a child sex abuse victim, according to a legal document filed in a United States court.
Lawyers acting for a former church member, Cheryl Bawtinheimer, were responding to a lawsuit brought against her by the church’s Australian charity, the Rapid Relief Team, which is seeking damages over videos she uploaded to YouTube that pictured the kookaburra.
In the lawsuit, filed in a California court in February, the church’s charity argues Bawtinheimer infringed its copyright when she briefly displayed the kookaburra logo in videos criticising the church and its practices.
The Brethren charity is demanding a jury trial in California, claiming Bawtinheimer’s actions have caused them material loss and damage. It wants all videos using the charity’s logo removed from YouTube, and for Bawtinheimer to pay the church any profits derived from the videos, as well as “monetary relief”. YouTube has already removed seven videos in response to complaints.
Bawtinheimer argues in the videos that the Rapid Relief Team (RRT) is simply an attempt to whitewash the church’s reputation. She has complained to police in her hometown in Canada that she was sexually abused for years, starting when she was just three years old, by a current Brethren member who was a volunteer for the charity until 2023.
RRT said in response to questions that the man had not been involved, “as we understand it, for some years”.
In comments to this masthead, Bawtinheimer has accused the Australian-based church of trying to silence her.
“At its core, this is about whether someone like me is allowed to speak openly about my experiences in a cult, and as a sexual abuse victim, and to criticise a powerful organisation without being dragged into a US federal lawsuit over a logo,” she said.
The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church and the Rapid Relief Team have both maintained this is a simple copyright case, “not an attempt to silence anyone”.
Bawtinheimer’s legal response to the lawsuit includes wider criticism of the Brethren and its response to child sex abuse. “Despite its extremely efficient and successful measures to lock down almost every other aspect of its members’ personal lives, [the Brethren church] has a shockingly high level of sexual abuse,” the document says, citing research presented at an International Cultic Studies Association conference last year.
The document goes on to say the church is a “culturally hermetically sealed bubble”, and when people “escape or are cast out”, they are ill-equipped to deal with the outside world and experience “extremely high levels of mental trauma and PTSD, as they struggle to survive”.
Their separation from the church means they are “shunned and regarded as dead by spouses, parents, children and friends”. Those who criticise the church can be subject to “intrusive surveillance and court-mandated searches of homes and electronics”.
“As the cult’s rules dictate that its members can only be employed by other members or cult-run businesses, they frequently lose their jobs too,” the legal document says. The church claims publicly that its members’ businesses collectively turn over $22 billion a year.
LGTBQ+ people “are treated as if their existence is an abhorrent sin, and some have been illegally prescribed chemical castration in an attempt to ‘cure’ them. When this inevitably fails, they are cast out without mercy,” the document says.
The Rapid Relief Team, the charity that brought the copyright lawsuit against Bawtinheimer, was formed in the 2010s. The church claims it is a genuine attempt to serve the public benefit, but Bawtinheimer’s filing claims it functions only as “the PR wing of the PBCC, generating a constant stream of ‘feel-good’ publicity in an attempt to counter and bury the darker truths hidden behind closed doors”.
RRT denies this, saying the Australian-registered charity is “motivated by Christian values” and provided “tangible support for communities in need”.
According to Bawtinheimer’s defence document, RRT’s operating procedures were “designed to gain maximum press and TV coverage by setting up brightly branded red tents at disaster sites, where conspicuously uniformed volunteers hand out coffee and fast food”.
Over summer, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was photographed chatting to RRT volunteers at a fire ground in Victoria. Photographs of the encounter were quickly uploaded to the RRT Facebook page, with the claim that the prime minister was “showing support for our community and recovery efforts”.
Albanese had earlier called the church a cult when members turned out in their thousands to campaign on behalf of then-Liberal leader Peter Dutton.
As for the Cookie the Kookaburra logo, Bawtinheimer’s legal counterclaim argues her use of it in her podcast was “obviously fair use” – a defence against copyright complaints.
The filing also alleges it cannot be considered a work of creative expression because: “This is not an original work at all, but rather a mashup of clip art, created from a standard stock image.”
“While Plaintiff [RRT] claims that the image is ‘wholly original,’ the fundamental design elements such as the exaggerated beak, the specific posture, and the ‘staring’ eyes are standard tropes used in generic Australian animal clip art.”
The RRT statement in response to questions said Cookie the Kookaburra was “an original design created by professional graphic designers in response to a specific design brief”.
Bawtinheimer’s lawyers argue in their filing that the attorneys acting for RRT, US firm Brown Rudnick, should have known all this before filing the claim.
Bawtinheimer’s legal team criticised them for an “underhanded (but not very original) plan” to barrage YouTube with “knowingly false takedown demands” in an attempt to silence Bawtinheimer.
“Their actual knowledge of copyright law and fair use should have merged with good ethics and resulted in them telling their client ‘no’,” the defence document says.
“Instead, they used that knowledge to try and game the system to silence RRT/Exclusive Brethren apostates and critics.”
RRT’s statement said the charity had “offered to withdraw the claim if the logo was removed, but as the claim has not been settled, proceedings must continue”.
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