Unification Church tries to derail ex-believer's press conference

The controversial Unification Church on Friday attempted to stop a former believer's press conference by sending a message purportedly signed by her parents, but she pressed ahead and spoke out on alleged abuses that she and other believers endured at its hands. In a summarized version of the faxed message read out during the event, Sayuri Ogawa's parents called for the press conference to be halted immediately, saying their daughter has a "tendency to lie," and the psychiatric issues she said she suffers had worsened since a gunman killed former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. At the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo, which hosted the event, Ogawa, who uses a pseudonym to protect her real identity, relayed her traumatic experiences as a so-called second-generation church believer.