CESNUR again met with controversy when one of the scheduled speakers at the 1997 CESNUR conference, who was to present scholarship on the religious group New Acropolis, was discovered to be a member of the very group she purported to study. Michiel Louter writing for Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer opined: It is difficult to believe that CESNUR-director Introvigne was not up-to-date on her membership in the group. The participation of the New Acropolis speaker to the conference was cancelled after the connection was publicly reported by Dutch publication Trouw. In the aftermath of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, CESNUR board member J. Gordon Melton and occasional CESNUR conference speaker James R. 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". In 2018, "Bitter Winter" was criticized for its sympathetic coverage of Eastern Lightning, also known as the Church of Almighty God, 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.