Title: Surviving Utopia
Subtitle: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple
Description: "Surviving Utopia" is a more autobiographical, less "academic," version of "Love Them to Death," published in March 2017, which Publishers Weekly calls "Stoen's deeply moving memoir." In that book I focused centrally on Jim Jones through 14 stages, as I experienced them. Here, I focus on myself in seeking, defending, opposing, and surviving utopia. I add my early years, and my reflections on the whole experience--psychological, political, and religious. On January 1, 1970, I joined Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, to create a utopia. On November 18, 1978, the utopian Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple became the operative causes of what pollster George Gallup called the "Jonestown story." The "Jonestown story," he said, was "the most widely followed event of 1978." The purpose of this book is to give an insider's personal account of that story, to share what it was like to have a dream smashed by that story, and to express deep gratitude for surviving—through no merit of my own—that story. I was the attorney, enemy, and post-mortem target of James Warren Jones who, on November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, South America, unleashed—in the name of "love"—terror and death. 918 people would die that day. This ordinary man, Jim Jones, who had an extraordinary rhetorical talent for capturing the souls of kind and decent people, got them to assassinate a US congressman and, incredibly, got them—by the hundreds—to line up and kill themselves and their children. That evening, as my wife Grace and I lay benumbed, on a floor in the Pegasus Hotel in Georgetown, Guyana, we knew in our hearts that one of those victims would be our beloved six-year-old son, John Victor Stoen. "The CIA would have to acknowledge," says Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, "that Jones succeeded where their MK-Ultra program failed in the ultimate control of the human mind." My seeking of utopia began on a Sunday afternoon—August 17, 1969—as I was leaving Black Panther headquarters in San Francisco. I proceeded to make three serious errors leading me into Peoples Temple. They were: anger, the ideology of "total equality," and pragmatism. My defending of utopia commenced on March 2, 1970, when I moved from Berkeley to Redwood Valley to cast my lot with Peoples Temple, and became the "county counsel" for Mendocino County and a pro bono lawyer for Jim Jones. Making Peoples Temple into a showcase model of total equality became a passionate dream. For seven years I aggressively defended Peoples Temple as a true utopian enterprise. During that time Jones became what the Washington Post would later be calling a "West Coast power." My opposing of utopia commenced on February 16, 1977, when I left my job as Head of Special Prosecutions for the San Francisco District Attorneys Office to go live in Jonestown with John Victor. His mother, Grace, was threatening a custody suit, and I had made a promise to protect Jones's paternity access to the child based on a false belief that he was the biological father. On November 18, 1977, I testified in court against Jones. I then went to Guyana to enforce our custody order against Jones, but the government was wired in his favor. The challenge of surviving of utopia commenced on November 18, 1978, when Jim Jones said on his death tape: "Somebody...see that Stoen does not get by with this infamy... He has done the thing he wanted to do. Have us destroyed." His loyalists accused me of manipulating the 1975 San Francisco mayoral election. Jones also issued that day a prophecy and a curse: "We win when we go down. Tim Stoen has nobody else to hate.... Then he'll destroy himself." I became deeply depressed by guilt and grief over the death of John Victor. I survived psychologically due to a spiritual experience in April 1988. Still, I had to claw myself back to society due to the media stigma. Finally, in 2000, I became a California prosecuting attorney, and have been such ever since.
Subjects: Jonestown Mass Suicide, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978, Peoples Temple, Autobiography and memoir
Places: San Francisco (Calif.), Jonestown (Guyana)
People: Jim Jones (1931-1978), Timothy Oliver Stoen (1938-)