A father and his three sons — accused of peddling poisonous industrial bleaching agent as a miracle medical cure out of a self-styled Florida church — all sat silently in a row at the defense table in Miami federal court as prosecutors laid out the case against them.
Prosecutors Michael Homer and John Shipley said the Grenons called themselves “bishops” and peddled MMS as “sacraments” to consumers across the United States in exchange for a “donation” to the Genesis church, before the Food and Drug Administration cracked down on the family for distributing an unapproved and misbranded drug in 2020.
Before the trial began on Monday, U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga gave an instruction to jurors that the Grenons could not use the First Amendment, specifically religious freedom, as a defense because their so-called church was not a religious entity. Another video, dated March 8, 2020, was titled: “The coronavirus is curable. Do you believe it? You better!”
It was in that year that Mark Grenon claims to have founded the organization with a man named Jim Humble in a plan to avoid governmental regulation and arrest as they promoted MMS as a miracle cure. Humble, a man who has dabbled in Scientology and professed to be a billion-year-old god, began promoting the substance as early as 2006 in self-published works after he claimed to have discovered its medical properties while on a gold-mining expedition in South America.
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