David Mitchell, weekly editor who exposed a corrupt cult, dies at 79

David Mitchell, a muckraker whose small California newspaper challenged the violent drug rehabilitation cult Synanon and as a result became one of the few weeklies to win a Pulitzer Prize, died Oct. 25 at his home in Point Reyes Station, California. ., in Marin County. He was 79.

His wife, Lynn Axelrod Mitchell, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Mitchell, a lanky, grizzled former literature teacher, also played a role in a retaliation for defamation by Synanon, the results of which advanced the rights of investigative journalists. In 1984, the California Supreme Court ruled that in certain cases they could keep the names of confidential sources secret without losing their defense in defamation and other civil cases.

Mr. Mitchell’s newspaper, The Point Reyes Light, was struggling financially, and the effort to stay afloat ultimately cost Mr. Mitchell his second marriage; his then wife, Catherine Mitchell, was co-publisher with him.

But the seven news articles and thirteen editorials that earned The Light the Pulitzer the Gold Medal for Public Service in 1979 for their “pioneering expose of this quasi-religious corporate cult” demonstrated the power of local journalism and drew attention to the paper for her role in a classic David-and-Goliath story.

“It’s one of those romantic stories about Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner or Horatio Alger,” columnist James Reston wrote in The New York Times in 1979. paper, defy the powerful interests in the community and win the big prize.”

It was said to be only the fourth time since the awards were first presented in 1917 that a weekly newspaper or one of its reporters won a Pulitzer. Mr. Mitchell kept the medal in his office safe.

In 1980, when Mr. Mitchell published “The Light on Synanon: How a Country Weekly Exposed a Corporate Cult – and Won the Pulitzer Prize,” a reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor wrote that it “should be required reading for everyone who thinks that a small newspaper can only serve a small purpose or that all the important news comes from Washington or abroad.

“By digging in their own backyard, the Mitchells have set an example for the whole world,” The Monitor said.

The book inspired a CBS-TV movie, “Attack on Fear” (1984), starring Paul Michael Glaser and Linda Kelsey as the Mitchells.

The Light, a sixteen-page tabloid, had a circulation of about 3,000 copies and in its best year made a profit of about $17,000. It shared space with a shoe repair shop on Main Street in Point Reyes Station, a peninsula town of about 400 people about 40 miles north of San Francisco and perched precariously high on the San Andreas Fault.

In 1973, a grand jury questioned tax irregularities and child abuse by Synanon, which was once widely respected but had developed into an authoritarian sect that declared itself a religion — the Church of Synanon — and would therefore be exempt from taxes. Later that year, reporters in San Francisco discovered that the Synanon drug rehabilitation center in Marshall, California, less than 10 miles from Point Reyes Station, was hoarding $60,000 worth of weapons.

Mr. Mitchell began his own research that same year, along with his wife and Richard J. Ofshe, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who had studied Synanon. For them, it was a story from their own backyard that they couldn’t ignore.

“It was a local story,” Mr. Mitchell told The Associated Press in 1979. “If that hadn’t been the case, we wouldn’t have written about it. We don’t even cover national news. If San Rafael, the county seat, were to disappear in a tidal wave, the only report would be that someone from West Marin happened to be shopping there and drowned.

The Mitchells wrote articles and editorials about violence, terrorism and financial irregularities at Synanon. There were reports that the founder, Charles Dederich, had demanded that men participating in the program have vasectomies and pregnant women have abortions, and that hundreds of married couples should change partners.

In 1980, Mr. Dederich pleaded no contest to charges that he and two members of Synanon’s security forces conspired to commit murder by putting a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued the organization. Synanon was dissolved in 1991.

Mr. Mitchell edited and published The Light for 27 years, from 1975 to 1981 and again from 1984 to 2005, when he retired. Then he started writing one blogging“Sparsely Sage and Timely,” which he continued until June.

Although he became famous for exposing Synanon in his newspaper, he expressed even greater satisfaction in a series of articles he oversaw for twenty years in which he attempted to place the latest influx of newcomers into Marin County into the historical perspective of the waves of foreigners who had settled. there since 1850.

“Probably the most important thing we’ve done, the thing I would be most proud of, is helping the Mexican immigrants here become part of the mainstream,” he said. The San Francisco Chronicle in 2005.

David Vokes Mitchell was born on November 23, 1943 in San Francisco to Edith (Vokes) Mitchell, a Canadian immigrant who sold advertisements for The Christian Science Monitor, and Herbert Houston Mitchell, who was a vice president of a printing company.

The family moved to Berkeley when David was three. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University in 1965 and a master’s degree in communications there in 1967.

After considering a career as an artist, he recalled on his blog, “To my parents and my own surprise, I ultimately left Stanford as an aspiring journalist.”

He taught at Marvel Academy in Rye, NY, and later taught speech and literature at Leesburg High School in Leesburg, Florida, where he participated in an effort to register black voters. He then taught English literature and journalism at Upper Iowa University in Fayette and later worked as a reporter for newspapers in Iowa and California.

In 1975, he and Catherine Mitchell sold their home and invested about $50,000 in The Light, a community newspaper where you might find a photo of smiling children displaying their prize-winning pumpkins, or a story about a firefighter getting a cow out of a tree (do that not). to ask).

He introduced a comic strip about an organic dairy cow with a craving for junk food, a column about sex and romance from a 78-year-old local woman and a Spanish-language column from a 13-year-old girl.

Realizing that he was a better journalist than a businessman, Mr. Mitchell first sold the newspaper in 1981, when he was 37. That same year, he and his wife, who was named Catherine Casto when they married, both divorced. of them are tired of the pressure to keep The Light more or less solvent as co-publishers.

Mr. Mitchell’s marriage to Linda Foor, Cynthia Clark and Ana Carolina Monterroso also ended in divorce.

In addition to his wife Lynn, whom he married in 2018, he is survived by three stepdaughters from a previous marriage: Anika Zappa-Pinelo, Kristeli Zappa Monterroso and Shaili Zappa Monterroso; and two step-grandchildren.

After leaving The Light for the first time, Mr. Mitchell became a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner, covering San Francisco and Central America. He bought the weekly again in 1983, when it went bankrupt. In 1986, Synanon dropped a libel and slander suit against The Light and agreed to pay the Mitchells $100,000, which he invested in computers and other office equipment.

In 2005, he sold The Light again, this time to Robert I. Plotkin, a former California prosecutor, for $100,000. In his farewell column, Mr. Mitchell wrote that the newspaper has won 109 national, regional and state journalism awards in his nearly three decades as publisher.

In the same column, he said that his goal as editor had always been to “ensure that the ‘little guy’ is not crushed by those in power.”

His staff didn’t need to be reminded, and neither did he. A sign in The Light’s office read: “It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.”