Therapists Settle Fraud Suit

A lawsuit charging that patients at a defunct Hollywood psychotherapy center were defrauded of their money, brainwashed and physically and emotionally abused has been settled for an undisclosed amount, an attorney for the plaintiffs said Friday.

“It was a favorable settlement,” said Paul Morantz, the attorney. “That’s all I can say. The judge has placed a gag order on discussing the settlement.”

At one point, 55 former patients at the Center for Feeling Therapy had filed suit against the institution, which closed in November, 1980. The settlement, negotiated Thursday by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Jack Tenner, involved 31 plaintiffs. Twenty-four other plaintiffs had settled earlier.

Run by therapists who were once hailed as “new Freuds,” the center attracted 350 mostly college-educated men and women in their 20s and 30s who lived communally in a compound of Hollywood houses.

Another 600 were outpatients, and the center also established clinics in Montreal, Munich, Boston, San Francisco and Hawaii.

Suits filed after the center’s collapse said patients spent thousands of dollars in pursuit of well-being at the center. Instead of well-being, however, one suit filed in 1981 said patients were persuaded to reject their past lives, friends, families and often jobs for up to nine years and received “therapy” from other patients and trainees.

Anthony Barash, an attorney who represented the center’s operators, said Friday that he could not comment on the settlement because of the gag order.