Thank you. A woman from Murfreesboro called and was told they did not have a record. I think she just got a csr rep who didn’t want to deal with it.

Very conflicted. His death means she will never financially recover.

Thank you for your help.

Hi all. I worked for (Actually volunteered for as I only was paid for 1 day of work over the course of at least a year+, with the rest being a promise of doing good political activism and getting a cut of the final film) Eric Allen Bell during his documentary period in Murfreesboro (when he was faking the film to be an anti-hate documentary about acceptance). I was very close to him for the years he was in town, and after he moved to "edit the film" he suddenly flipped script and treated me terribly, sent threatening legal notices and tried to reference an NDA if I ever spoke out about what I knew about him from the time I worked for him.

Now that he's dead, and it seems to be pretty confirmed. I can now openly discuss what happened, etc. as I don't think the NDA he had me sign was valid anyways since I was unpaid. I'm still writing up my own personal story and will post it here as well if people are interested. I haven't done it yet as I'm still pretty conflicted over the entire thing. On one hand, there's a huge relief that he won't continue to threaten me or attempt to blackmail me any longer. On the other side, I had always hoped that one day he'd snap back to reality and realize how many people he burned and change his ways.

If anyone has any specific questions they'd be interested in me answering about him, please let me know, and I'll try to answer it the best I can in my write-up about my several years of experience with him.

" . . . he suddenly flipped script and treated me terribly"

Absolutely vintage Eric Allen Bell. He did this to EVERYBODY.

Please provide any information [as opposed to rumor] you have about EAB.

What kind of information do you want? I have tons ... but what does it matter now that he’s dead? If he has any sort of insurance or estate, he has it hidden. Nobody can recover the money he owes.

My name is Renee. I need to tell this because Eric ruined my life. “Alberta” is the only friend I have on here and I have used her account on occasion in the past. The other “friend” who claimed to know me was clearly Eric under a fake account. I know this because he did exactly what he threatened to do ... Pure character assassination should I ever speak about what he took from me. I have the threats in email. My story begins back in 2010 when Eric first came to TN. We became friends. He knew I had spent time in film school and loved documentary film making. He also knew lots about my personal life because we became such “close friends” he knew my childhood traumas, he knew my health issues, he knew the problems in my marriage, he knew everything. I trusted him with every secret about my life.

I originally loaned him 10k to finish the trailer for not welcome (yes , I have signed loan documents) then I let him use my credit card because he told me he did not secure enough finances to pay me back the original 10 k. He had to go to LA . In 3 short months he ran up over 25k on my credit card telling me that he was going to make the payments as soon as “he signed the deal”

None of “the high price of telling the truth” is legit. I WAS HIS “funding” not Soros, not Michael Moore, not “Jewish Hollywood “ it was just him grafting me. I was stupid enough to believe thst we were doing something good. I was stupid enough to trust him.

I spent the next 8 years trying to work out a payment plan. I tried everything to get him to honor his debt. It was always something . He never had the money. Then I realized that he was renting a house in the hills of Laguna Beach with a damn elevator the year I lived with s tarp over a hole in my roof. I finally got enough money and courage to get any attorney this year. It was right after she contacted him that my “friend” showed up on this forum writing a really warped story about the nature of our friendship. His intent embarrass me into silence was clear.

Within weeks he was deceased, I will never recover financially, he destroyed me.

But that’s who he was

Sorry for such a late response to this. Honestly, even after his death was confirmed, I had this overwhelming fear that it was all a hoax, so I just stayed quiet for a bit longer.

So I'll start with my involvement with him from the beginning to end.

I met Eric Allen bell in 2010. He was coming around our group, MTRF (Middle Tennesseeans For Religious Freedom), to film a documentary about the mosque getting a new location, and the backlash it was receiving. I was about a year into film school at the time, and after meeting him, he seemed to be on board with MTRF and what we were doing. He invited me out to make me an offer to join his film crew. At the meeting he talked about his huge film background, and how he could mentor me in the industry, and about his film The Bondage and the AAA Actors he worked with. He gave me a copy of the film, and it was legit. So I took the bait and joined his film crew. He promised to pay me for my work, however, after the first day and $100, he said he was unable to pay me for long term, as he hadn't expected the documentary to take this long. He later said he would pay me when he got funding after putting together a rough cut, and then offered me a percentage split on the final film. Being in college and starry eyes, I just said yes to everything.

During the time I worked with him, I became what I thought was his best friend. I slacked off on school, and focused purely on the documentary with him. Spending 10-12 hours a day with him, and seeing him basically daily. He would throw huge parties at his house all the time, and invite people over, but then would pull out his camera during parties and film people. He claimed it was for making memories, but we later learned it was for blackmail to not talk poorly of him. He was very paranoid, and it's hard to discern what was an act, or what was actually just bad mental health. He would call me at 3AM and tell me sometimes that he thought someone was outside his house, casing the place. He would think people were following him. He eventually hired private security for a few months, and bought a wide arrange of "self-defense" tasers/batons etc. and insisted that myself and others close to him had them so that we could defend ourselves.

During the "mentorship" he would tell me how he used to run a Psychic Network, and would train people on how to scam rich hollywood-types. He insisted that he would never do it to anyone who wasn't deserving, and made himself out to be a Robin Hood of sorts. But he told me techniques on how to do fake psychic readings or getting messages from loved ones, and how to keep people on the phone for a long time to get their money. He claims he ran the network and trained people to do it for him now, and that's where most of his income was coming from (I did not know about Renee until she introduced herself to me after he moved away and flipped on everyone).

During the documentary, he got a good number of his interviews by using myself and another staff member (who wishes to not be named/involved) to go in and pretend to be student film-makers and ask questions. He would frequently push me to provoke people at rallies to get them upset to have good sound bytes. And he would sometimes then use those soundbytes as blackmail to get real interviews, with the threat that he'd release their recorded threats instead.

He would also create many fake profiles on social media to infiltrate people's feeds, creating them way in advance and giving them backstories so that they all seemed real. They had profiles/lifespans of many years, making them very believable. He would also buy the domain names for any public official, etc. and variations that he could find, and point them to his documentary. He would frequently make deals with right-wing extremists for interviews, etc. claiming to be with them (which I guess he turned out to actually be). He could bait anyone into saying just about anything he wanted to on camera. He was great at getting the "sound byte" that he wanted from anyone.

After we wrapped production, he moved to edit the film, and within a few weeks, everything changed. It started when he called me up and was like "I think I may have a different opinion on everything now and want to change the direction of the film". I tried to talk him down, but could not. Later he called me with a wild claim that one of our friends had access to one of the oppositions medication information and was telling people what it was (none of this was true). I combatted it, and he quickly brought up an NDA that I signed, and threatened to sue me if I spoke out against him ever. From there the relationship was severed. He put out a trailer for the hate-film, and included my name on it and on IMDB. It was the main thing on my resume, so in any location that I could find it, I would state that I worked on the documentary when it was not a hate-film, and that my involvement stopped the second it turned around. Anytime he saw that posted, he would once again send me a Cease and Desist and threaten legal action. I eventually was able to talk to a lawyer and found out that the NDA I signed was invalid. Still, I laid low because of the threats he would send. At first he would threaten to never pay me, but when I responded and told him that I don't want money from a hate film, he then refused to remove me from the IMDB page, no matter how many requests I sent in. So my name was forever attached to it. This film was never released other than a trailer. I assume so that he never had to actually pay anyone back for all the back-end promises he had made.

When I couldn't get the credit removed, I stopped working in the film industry, as I got tired of having to explain why the film "American Infidel" was what I was "known for". A day before his death I emailed him asking to be removed from the IMDB of American Infidel, only to go look for it and realize that not only was I removed, but the film was removed completely. After hearing of his death, I was conflicted. I had always hoped somewhere in the back of my mind that he would turn out to not be a terrible person. But he was, and it's over now. And that's good.