- HOUSTON - Along with soap and vitamins, those friendly Amway salesmen
have been pushing something else for years- false rumors that rival Procter
& Gamble Co. is in league with the devil - attorneys charged in opening
arguments of a lawsuit Monday.
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- Procter & Gamble lawyers said Amway
Corp. had tried to take away sales by fomenting the mistaken belief, prevalent
in some religious circles, that Procter & Gamble's venerable trademark
incorporated satanic symbols such as the number "666" and devil's
horns.
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- "They (Amway) know full well the
malignant, cancerous effect of associating someone with a satanic cult,"
Procter & Gamble attorney Mike Gallagher said. "It incorporates
everything that is bad and nothing that's good." The lawsuit is the
culmination of years of bitterness between Procter & Gamble and Amway,
which has filed a counter-suit charging that Procter & Gamble is conducting
a smear campaign.
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- Procter & Gamble attorneys said Amway
might have encouraged the rumors since they first surfaced in the 1970s.
The lawsuit asks for $595 million in lost sales from 1995 to 1997, plus
an unspecified amount for damage to the company's reputation.
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- An attorney for direct marketer Amway
denied the charges and said Procter & Gamble had sued because it was
concerned about Amway's strong sales growth in Asia.
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- The trademark, which dates back to the
1850s, shows a bearded "man in the moon" looking over 13 stars,
one for each of the original 13 American colonies.
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- Procter & Gamble says the trademark
"remains an important company identification" but removed it
in 1985 from the company's more than 300 products. These include such well-known
brands as Tide laundry detergent, Crest toothpaste, Ivory soap, Pampers
disposable diapers and Folgers coffee.
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- In an audio tape played in court Monday,
an Amway distributor said in an April 1995 voice mail to other distributors
that Procter & Gamble's president had admitted on the Phil Donahue
television show that a percentage of the company's profits went to the
"Church of Satan."
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- But Amway attorney Charles Babcock, who
successfully defended talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey against a 1998 lawsuit
brought by Texas livestock producers who said she had defamed beef, said
Amway did not approve of the distributor's message and had quickly ordered
him to send out a retraction.
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- "We've bent over backwards to help
Procter & Gamble stop this rumor," he said.
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- Babcock said the Satanism rumors emanated
not from Amway but from religious groups unhappy about Procter & Gamble's
sponsorship of controversial television programs. He charged that the company
had handled the problem badly from the beginning.
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- He showed a videotape of comedian David
Letterman joking about the rumors on his television show to make the point
that the firm's botched public relations efforts had spread the Satanism
rumors far and wide.
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- "They're not mad at us. They're
mad at themselves, and they're trying to blame us," Babcock said.
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- The real reason for the lawsuit, Babcock
argued, was Procter & Gamble's concern that Amway was growing rapidly
in Asia because of its direct-sales strategy.
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- The company sells its 450 products through
3 million independent distributors worldwide, not through stores, and is
known as much for its aggressive recruiting of new distributors as it is
for its products.
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