1. How a Cyberstalker Maligns Spiritual Teachers to Bolster Her Own Image 

THE MALICIOUS MANIA OF BE SCOFIELD: 

How a Cyberstalker Maligns Spiritual Teachers to Bolster Her Own Image 

 

Note to Readers 

The information in this report is based on official police reports as well as interviews and research conducted by a licensed private investigator. Pertinent information contained in this report was extracted from police reports in the public records, which were delivered in a PDF file from the authorities to Sirius Investigations. Because the visual quality is poor and the screenshots take up a lot of space and disrupt the flow of this report, the reproductions of these public records are included in Appendix A at the end of this report. 

 

The Background of This Report 

This report has been written and is presented by Sirius Investigations, a licensed private investigation company with more than a decade of experience. We were hired to investigate the methods used by Be Scofield, who promotes herself as a professional journalist and courageous “cult hunter.” Our investigation revealed that Scofield engages in deceptive practices by using a wide variety of names and email addresses, and by posting her articles on multiple self-owned websites, all to make herself seem like a credible reporter. Scofield repeatedly writes about herself in the third person as if a separate entity were praising her work. Be Scofield also regularly violates copyright laws, threatens those who disagree with her, and has routinely posted malicious gossip instead of doing the work of investigative journalism.

The role of a professional private investigator is to find the truth. It doesn’t matter who is paying the bill or whether we like our clients or the people we are investigating; we do our best to talk to all parties and determine what actually happened. We don’t edit the facts. We don’t advocate for one side or the other. We strive to present logical conclusions based on factual evidence and interviews as if we’re preparing for a court case. That’s the job.

In 2019, Be Scofield published an article on her website that falsely linked a spiritual leader named Aaravindha Himadra with the death of a woman, Carla Jean Shaffer, thirteen years earlier on Orcas Island. Due to the damage caused by Scofield’s libelous article, Sirius Investigations was hired to reveal the truth.

 

The Conclusions of Our Investigation 

In late 2018, Be Scofield set out to accuse a man she’d never met of committing horrific crimes during events that happened in 2005 and 2006. Even before doing any investigation, Scofield admitted this intention in an email message to the local county prosecutor. In early 2019, Scofield published a malicious article, “Aaravindha Himadra and the Mysterious Orcas Island Death of Carla Jean Shaffer,” on her own website, and then promoted it via other websites she owns and via her own Facebook page.

After six months of steady in-depth research and analysis, our investigation came to the same determination that several law enforcement agencies, as well as the coroner and prosecuting attorney, and the medical examiners had concluded long ago: absolutely no evidence exists that any crime had been committed.

Based on our research into the police reports, the medical reports we obtained, and our investigator’s interviews of Orcas Island residents knowledgeable about the events, we found no connection between Carla Shaffer’s death and Aaravindha Himadra. Be Scofield’s insinuations were both intentionally harmful and highly defamatory.

The allegation that Himadra had been involved in Carla Shaffer’s death was the result of Be Scofield’s deceitful attempt to create a sensational story where, in fact, there was no motivation, opportunity, or evidence of his involvement. The events of late 2005 that Be Scofield insinuates Himadra was responsible for occurred when he and his wife were in Europe for two months on a teaching tour.

Be Scofield requested and received police and medical records, yet she clearly ignored and avoided including all the evidence that showed Aaravindha had no involvement in Carla’s death. She recklessly set out to frame an innocent man of a crime that didn’t happen.

Our investigation showed that Be Scofield relentlessly promotes herself as a self-styled “cult hunter.” Scofield’s unfounded attack on Himadra is only one of many similar attacks she has carried out on prominent spiritual teachers. Scofield’s methodology seems to be to target a spiritual teacher, gather any salacious gossip (regardless of its credibility) that might support the evil-cult-leader accusation she intends to make, ignore inconvenient facts that don’t support her goal, and then fabricate scandalous, unsubstantiated accusations and distribute them as widely as possible on the internet.

In keeping with her standard practices, Scofield accused Himadra of running a dangerous cult. Our investigation determined this allegation to be a complete fabrication, invented and publicized by Be Scofield to create a false air of sinister suspicion. No cult has ever been associated with Aaravindha Himadra.

The real crimes committed and perpetrated by the publication and promotion of the article were carried out by the attention-hungry, self-ascribed “guru basher,” Be Scofield. She used the tragic death of an unfortunate, psychologically unstable woman as an opportunity to invent a smear story that would attract more online attention to her “cult-hunter” persona she intends to present to the internet world.

Scofield’s article and her subsequent actions have done severe damage, stirring up purposefully misdirected anger and false suspicions in an otherwise pleasant, peaceful community on Orcas Island. Aaravindha Himadra and his wife Ashayrah have also suffered serious injury to their personal and business lives. Due to Be Scofield’s actions, the couple has received death threats and damage to their personal property, as well as damage to the property of a colleague.

The following sections will describe how Be Scofield strategized and perpetuated this heinous, ongoing attack against Aaravindha Himadra, and how she continues to attack spiritual leaders around the world using lies and innuendo to promote the reputation she has invented for herself.

 

The Role of Cyberstalking and Social Media in this Report 

These days, the task of uncovering the truth is harder than ever. We are living in an era where too many people feel emboldened to lie in order to elevate themselves or their cause. Those who spread messages of hate and conspiracy will always find enthusiastic followers who want to blame someone for the problems they perceive in the world, and those followers are often eager to believe the worst about people they’ve never met.

Social media has made spreading hate messages easy and fast. In the past, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan hid their identities under hoods and robes. Now, social media allows haters and conspiracy theorists to hide behind fake identities and disseminate their messages worldwide within seconds.

What kind of a world are we living in if everyone is allowed to spread lies without ever being challenged?

We all know that cyberstalking, also called cyber-bullying, is real. And we all understand that it’s damaging. Teenagers have committed suicide after being humiliated on social media. Politicians have lost their jobs after personal photos have been shared in revenge attacks.

Although the legal system is struggling to keep up with ever-evolving social media, the United States now has laws against cyberstalking.

What is cyberstalking? The site https://legaldictionary.net defines cyberstalking as:

The use of electronic communications to persistently harass someone.

More details from legaldictionary.net:

Cyberstalking involves using electronic means, including the Internet, to stalk or harass a person or group of people.

Key factors to identifying cyberstalking cases include:

  • False accusations. A cyberstalker often tries to damage the reputation of his victim by posting false information on social media websites or blogs. A perpetrator may even create fictitious websites or other accounts for the purpose of spreading false rumors and allegations about the victim.
  • Encouraging others to harass the victim. The offender may encourage the involvement of third parties to harass the victim.
  • False victimization. It is not uncommon for a cyberstalker to claim the victim is harassing him, taking the position of victim in his own mind.

For individuals unwilling to take responsibility for what they write, the internet is a great place to hide. In the hands of a reckless, tech-savvy individual who is willing to create multiple websites and virtual personas and who understands search engine optimization (SEO), the internet can be more dangerous than any assault rifle. Any of us could be targeted by a disgruntled associate or even a perfect stranger, and accused of a serious crime—theft, child molesting, murder. Private investigators can tell you that it’s hard to defend against an accusation, no matter how baseless it may be, especially when that accusation has been spread far and wide.

This is the description of our investigation into one case with just such an individual, Be Scofield, a cyberstalker who set out to publish intentionally damaging gossip about people she never met, to insinuate that they are guilty of crimes that never happened. And it’s not the first time.

This is an account of the methodology that Scofield used to target one of her victims and then publish lies and innuendo as though they were the truth. This is not journalism. A story cobbled together not from facts or reliable sources, but from inuendo and outright fabrications, and then spread all over the internet is not “news.”

This sort of malicious publication, especially when widely distributed via the worldwide web, can destroy reputations.

It can destroy livelihoods.

It can destroy lives.

Publishing lies to damage the reputation of a victim is a crime, especially when the false information is repeated on multiple social media sites.

 

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