Lewis flew to Japan at the expense of Aum Shinrikyo; they then held press conferences in Japan stating their belief that the group did not have the ability to produce sarin and was being scapegoated. Melton later revised his judgment. A paper mentioning the investigation was presented at the 1995 CESNUR conference. Though CESNUR director Massimo Introvigne defended what he termed the "much maligned" investigation, others in the field felt that the scholars' defense of Aum Shinrikyo led to a crisis of confidence in religious scholarship when Aum's culpability was proven. Scholar Ian Reader disputed Introvigne's defense, writing "the case in hand certainly shows that some scholars are capable of saying what those who call on them want them to say, even when the evidence points the other way". Eastern Lightning and the murder of Wu Shuoyan In 2018, Bitter Winter was criticized for its sympathetic coverage of Eastern Lightning, a group regarded as a cult in China. Introvigne discussed in Bitter Winter the 2014 murder of Wu Shuoyan, attributed by Chinese authorities to Eastern Lightning. He supported the position first presented in articles of the Chinese daily The Beijing News in 2014, then advocated in 2015 by Australian scholar Emily Dunn, that the perpetrators were not members of Eastern Lightning at the time of the murder. This position was described in 2020 by reporter Donald Kirk as common among scholars. However, while Dunn wrote that the two leaders of the group that committed the murder "started out as members of Eastern Lightning (in 1998 and 2007 respectively), [but] they had outgrown it" and were no longer part of the sect in 2014. Introvigne, based on a different interpretation of the same Chinese sources quoted by Dunn, argued, both in Bitter Winter and in his 2020 book Inside The Church of Almighty God, that they had never been members of Eastern Lightning. Mainstream reporting held that in 2002, members of Eastern Lightning kidnapped 34 members of the China Gospel Fellowship and held them captive for two months, with the aim of coercing them to join Eastern Lighting. Introvigne, however, suggested in 2018 that China Gospel Fellowship invented the story of the kidnapping as justification for the fact that many of its members, including national leaders, had converted to Eastern Lightning. In his 2020 book, he adopted a more nuanced position, suggesting that China Gospel Fellowship members described as "kidnapping" what