“Church of Bleach” family goes to trial, representing themselves in court
A Florida family that allegedly formed a faux church and made over $1 million by falsely selling toxic industrial bleach as a miracle cure for HIV, cancer, COVID-19, and other diseases is now standing trial in Miami.
Mark Grenon, 65, his sons Jonathan, 37, Joseph, 35, and Jordan, 29, and their quasi-religious church, Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, based in Bradenton, are all facing federal criminal charges from 2020 of conspiring to defraud the US and selling misbranded drugs. Their trial began Monday.
After the charges were filed in 2020, Jonathan and Jordan Grenon were arrested in Bradenton, but Mark and Joseph fled to Colombia, where they were arrested by local authorities and extradited to the US.
In court, the four men appeared in matching beige inmate uniforms, beards, and ponytails, according to the Miami Herald. The Grenons have reportedly decided to represent themselves during the trial. But the Herald noted that they declined to give an opening statement, an intriguing legal move.
Federal prosecutors did not pass up the opportunity to make opening statements, however. They depicted the family members as “con men” and “snake-oil salesmen” who tried to skirt federal regulations by pretending their “miracle” bleach business was a religious organization. The Grenons allegedly referred to themselves as “bishops” and sold bleach solutions as “sacraments” in exchange for church “donations.”
Prosecutor Michael Homer asked Food and Drug Administration special agent Jose Rivera to take the stand. Rivera led an undercover investigation of the Grenons, in which he bought multiple bottles of the family’s “Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS).” When prepared as directed with an activator, MMS turns into chlorine dioxide, an industrial bleaching agent.
At one point, Rivera—who was using a fake name—complained to the Grenons that the MMS he bought did not improve his (fictional) wife’s cancer after three weeks of use. One of the Grenon sons advised him that she would need to use the solution for a longer period of time before seeing any miraculous efficacy.
When Homer asked Rivera on the stand why the Grenons sold MMS through a pseudo-religious business, he replied: “To get around government regulation and not go to jail.”
Homer and fellow prosecutor John Shipley claimed the Grenons had been illegally selling tens of thousands of MMS bottles since 2010, which is when Grenon claimed to have cofounded the “church” with Jim Humble, who claimed to be a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy. Humble reportedly stepped away from the church in 2017.
In 2019, the FDA warned consumers that it had “received new reports of people experiencing severe vomiting, severe diarrhea, life-threatening low blood pressure caused by dehydration and acute liver failure after drinking these products.”
Despite federal court orders to stop selling MMS in 2020, the Grenons kept the business going. “We are practicing ‘civil disobedience’ against this unjust order! Civil disobedience is permitted in the US Constitution, peaceably of course at first, if possible,” the Grenons wrote in a letter to a federal judge. “NOTE: The 2nd Amendment is there in case it can’t be done peaceably.”
“The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing will not stop… providing our sacraments to the world! The DOJ and FDA have NO authority over our Church,” the letter went on.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1954890