Today in History: Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies) died on this day in 2012. The Unification Church is widely known for its brainwashing and mass-weddings, in fact, in 1988 Moon entered the Guinness Book of Records when he married 6,516 identically dressed couples at Seoul’s Olympic Stadium. However, the newly-weds were forbidden to sleep together for 40 days to prove their marriage was on a higher plane. The Unification Church is a mix of Christianity, Confucianism, Shamanism and anti-Communism, but one defector claimed the Church was simply "a cash operation". In the 1990s, thousands of Japanese elderly people claimed to have been defrauded of their life savings by Moon followers. Moon's church was the subject of the largest consumer fraud investigation in Japan's history in 1997 and number of subsequent court decisions awarded hundreds of millions of yen in judgments, including 37.6 million yen ($300,000) to pay two women coerced into donating their assets to the Unification Church. Yet, this movement was able to build partnerships with politicians and Evangelical religious leaders, as well as Louis Farrakhan. Sun Myung Moon’s net worth was estimated to be close to $900 million at the time of his death in 2012.
Moon was also involved in extramarital affairs and he was alleged to have sex rituals amongst six married female disciples who came to be known as "The Six Marys".
If you've ever heard of, or read the book "Icons of Evolution", the author, Jonathan Wells, is a Moonie.
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