An article by religious scholar J. Gordon Melton examines her court testimonies, noting ways these build on and differ from her professional publications by expanding from general assertions of social influence within "cults" to a more robust "Singer hypothesis" which leads directly to a "robot theory" of brainwashing. Melton has been described by his critics as a "defender" of organisations that they have labeled as being cults, including the Scientologists, and briefly the Aum Shinrikyo cult after it conducted a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway, that Margaret Singer associated with undue influence in her book, Cults In Our Midst (2003).