Willis Carto archive
Including information about his associates
What others have said about Willis Carto
By Tony Ortega
Jun 27, 2025
A reader sent us a note recently about a subject that comes up from time to time.
(Thanks to the Internet, after all, even minor news is eternal.)
It was in reference to a bizarre 1990s court fight that resulted after a war had broken out among Holocaust deniers.
The Los Angeles Times called it an insurrection,
and portrayed Institute of Historical Review founder Willis Carto, a notorious antisemite and white supremacist who had been tossed out by the Costa Mesa organization he had created, clinging to its glass doors like a tough sea barnacle.
Three lawsuits spun out of the mutiny of younger IHR officers against the founder Carto, who was then 67, while Jewish groups cheered at the chaos.
Let them shoot each other,
a researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center said.
Carto had also organized the right-wing Liberty Lobby and its publication, [The] Spotlight, and had been active in conservative politics since the 1950s. He had personally chosen each of the employees of the IHR, which he had started in 1978 in order to publish denialist articles that disputed the evidence that 6 million Jews had perished in the Holocaust.
But increasingly, that hand-picked crew had grown dissatisfied with Carto’s cost-cutting ways and for his attempts to push the IHR away from Holocaust denialism into a more purely white supremacist direction.
Leading the fight to oust Carto was the IHR’s director, a man named Tom Marcellus, who also happened to be a Scientologist.
Marcellus, in court documents, alleged that Carto had been moving money between the IHR and Liberty Lobby in fraudulent ways. Carto denied it, and accused his detractors of spreading brazen smears.
In September 1993, Carto was frozen out by the IHR’s board, and the lawsuits were launched.
And just about every news story about the fracas included that one unusual fact: In the middle of this fight between extreme right-wing political propagandists, there was a Scientologist, Tom Marcellus.
What was he doing there? And were there other connections to Scientology in the fight?
Willis Carto believed there were. Or at least, he made that accusation.
Carto died in 2015, but many of the articles from this time by him and about him are still posted in a website dedicated to documenting this war (williscarto.com).
And one of the items you will find there describes some lurid allegations made by Carto in 1998, five years after his ouster. He accused Marcellus of being involved in a takeover of Scientology by Israel’s Mossad, in conjunction with elements of the CIA.
The CIA, Carto said, would be interested in Scientology’s reputed mind-control powers.
In 2000, Carto added more detail: Scientology leader David Miscavige was only a front man,
and when Mossad decided to move against IHR, Scientology zombie Marcellus was already in place. Acting under Miscavige’s instructions, Marcellus then brought another Scientologist, Greg Raven, into the IHR to assist the planned coup.
While the idea of Scientology under Mossad control is wacky even by the standards of some conspiracy-loving former Scientologists we know, we were curious that the williscarto website also has documents showing that Raven was not, in fact, a Scientologist, something Carto ignored even after personally deposing Raven under oath. (That’s at the website as well.)
So, what was the story? Was there a connection between Scientology and the coup at the IHR or not?
We know, thanks to an affidavit prepared by Denise Brennan before she died in 2014, that Hubbard was a Spotlight reader, and the Commodore quoted from the Carto publication in a 1979 letter (about an ad Hubbard saw in the weekly newspaper regarding using religious status to get around paying taxes).
And as for extremist politics, Hubbard certainly was no slouch. As historian Chris Owen discovered in a piece he did for us, in 1967 Hubbard wrote to South Africa’s prime minster pledging Scientology’s support for the apartheid government there, and Hubbard referred to Scientology as an organization that was loyal to the Rightist cause.
Hubbard was a classic red-baiting mid-century reactionary. He died in 1986, but would his successor, David Miscavige, have gotten Scientology involved in the IHR fight?
First, we wondered if it was possible to find out what had happened to Tom Marcellus himself.
We managed to find this photo in an old copy of the IHR’s newsletter, of a 1994 conference it held featuring Holocaust denier David Irving.
In the photo, Irving is second from the right. And fourth from the right, the caption identifies Marcellus, who has a rather distinctive look, with his beard.
More recently, a man named Tom Marcellus has operated a website that offers expert help on obsolete computer databases. If your company is switching from one database system to another, Quick Answer, Marcellus’ company, is ready to help.
At the Quick Answer website, we found this photo of the Tom Marcellus who owns the Costa Mesa company.
Clearly, the same guy. (Marcellus today would be 75, so he might look a little older these days.) We sent him an email, hoping he might be interested in helping us understand that IHR battle, but we didn’t hear anything.
But then, we heard from another participant in the 1990s battles: Greg Raven, the man that Carto accused of being a Scientologist brought in to help Marcellus take over the company.
We reached out to Raven when we realized that he was the person who maintained the williscarto.com web pages, which are generally very critical of Carto. In particular, the documents showing that Carto falsely accused Raven of being a Scientologist.
Tom already worked there when I was hired (he and Willis conducted my interview), and neither Tom nor Willis ever spoke substantively about Scientology, if I remember correctly. One of our secretaries was also a Scientologist of some stripe (she seemed not too committed to it, from what I could tell), so there was nothing Church of Scientology-related from that angle either,
Raven said in an email.
He added that Carto didn’t begin making accusations about a Scientology connection to IHR until after we discovered his embezzlement, and launched proceedings to remove him.
In a second email, Raven said that when he worked there, he saw little connection between Scientology and the Legion for the Survival of Freedom (LSF), IHR’s parent company.
I have a vague recollection about asking Tom about seeing if the Church of Scientology would be interested in contributing in any way to help us in our battle against what seemed to be a common enemy, but he deferred and nothing even came of that suggestion,
Raven remembers. (And by common enemy,
he is referring to the IRS.) [sic]
We told Raven that we had been unable to get a response from Marcellus, and we were curious whether Marcellus was still a Scientologist, and still interested in the revisionist cause, or possibly both.
As far as I know, Tom was/is just a Scientologist who was/is interested in revisionism. The other Scientologist on staff was his girlfriend before I came on board, but I have no idea if she was with Scientology before they met or if he got her interested. Same with LSF: She might have simply needed a job.
I don’t personally know of any connection between Scientology and LSF or any other causes or organizations. Like I mentioned, there was virtually zero talk about Scientology at LSF. It wasn’t an issue in any way, shape, or form, even after Carto started making his wild claims and accusations.
Tom was doing his database thing while he was still at LSF … My impression was that he was pretty expert in that corner of the market, so his talents were in demand. We keep in touch irregularly (Christmas cards, birthday greetings, occasional e-mails). He moved on one way and I moved on in a different direction, so even though I am fond of him and grateful for all the work he did for LSF, our paths haven’t crossed hardly at all for many years now.
Raven says he hasn’t been in contact with LSF since he left the company in the early 2000s.
And even though our own politics are rather different than Mr. Raven’s, we thanked him sincerely not only for maintaining on the Internet, at his cost, those records of Willis Carto and his bizarre battles, but also for answering our inquiry, and helping us get a better view of those times.
It appears to us that it was only a coincidence that Tom Marcellus, one of the people at the center of a wild 1990s battle between Holocaust revisionists, was a Scientologist.
And no, we are not convinced by Willis Carto’s allegations that David Miscavige is running Scientology for the Mossad. Just sayin’.
Source: Tony Ortega