‘Correct.’
But is the Church of Scientology under David Miscavige a cult?
‘It’s degenerated into the cult of David Miscavige. He has become someone who is infallible, who is all-knowing, all-seeing, expects absolute obeisance and people now look to him like he is beyond any criticism or beyond any reproach and will blindly follow the things that he says to do.’
The Church, of course, was not best pleased with Mike Rinder giving an interview to Scientology’s devil, which we broadcast in the autumn of 2010. Its on-line Freedom Magazine has even created a special graphic, a cartoon of Mike looking at himself in a mirror and suddenly morphing into a fanged, green-skinned cobra, complete with chilling sound effects. The Mike-into-cobra cartoon is compelling evidence that the organising intelligence behind the Church of Scientology is very troubled. It strikes one as being nasty, pathological and pathetic. If this man really is so incompetent and lacklustre as the Church suggests, then why bother attack him so viciously? And how does the Church square blackening its enemies in this way while advancing its claim to be respected as a religion? It’s schizoid.
Weirdly, the Church’s Freedom Magazine and I ask the same question: ‘Was Mike Rinder lying then, or is he lying now?’ It then adds its own gloss: ‘Regarding the anti-Scientology drivel he now funnels to the tabloid media? You be the judge after reading the following verbatim quotes from Rinder when he served the Church as spokesperson… “Look, there is a string of these people…that goes back 25 years. Most of them you will never see again. They have their moment of glory where they make their wild allegations. They get coverage in the media. And then, they disappear. Their claims are proven to be untrue, and they’re gone.”
Mike Rinder to BBC Panorama in 2007…
‘In a 2007 letter to the BBC, Rinder again set the record straight: “[W]e repeatedly requested the name of any source alleging ‘bullying’ and ‘beating.’ The only individual you name is (B.H.) [Bruce Hines]. You must find it at least a little strange that [he] has appeared in various media in the United States, France and the UK over the last two years and has never made this allegation before. In each case he has told stories that the media at the time wanted to hear. You are just the latest, and obviously this is what you wanted to hear from him, so he manufactured a tale.”’
This is weird on weird to the power of ten. The Church’s Freedom Magazine is seeking to disgrace its former spokesman and make his word appear unreliable by quoting his remarks to me and a letter to the BBC. The obvious retort is, having defected from what he now says is a cult, Mike has changed his mind. Painting Mike as a cobra or reminding the world of what he told me in 2007 does not address the substance of the grave complaints made by Mike and other senior ex-members of the Church, that they were beaten, abused and humiliated by David Miscavige when they were inside the Church. These are allegations which the Church and Miscagive deny.
The next day Mike introduced me to Marty Rathbun, the former Inspector-General of the Church and once David Miscavige’s right hand man. After 27 years inside, he left in 2004. Marty used to be Scientology’s confessor to, amongst others, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, and John Travolta, and he had offered to give me an opportunity on the E-meter. I sat opposite him and picked up the cans while he twiddled with a dial on the E-meter.
‘What I am going to do is I am going to pinch you. And I want you to just check and see what the needle does when I pinch you, just note it ok.’
He pinched me.
‘Ow!’
‘Now what I want you to do, keep watching the needle, is recall the moment of that pinch. Now right….John.’
I recalled the moment of pain from the pinch, and the needle jagged to attention. I laughed nervously as my scepticism queued up for the bus home.
‘That’s a bit creepy,’ I said, ‘because my mind remembered the pinch and then that registered.’
The E-meter, Scientologists both within and without the Church believe, helps you uncover repressed thoughts. It didn’t take Marty long to find a naughty thought of mine.
‘Are you nervous or concerned about something?’ asked Marty.
‘I am fighting this. Also I am thinking of something that I am not going to tell anyone about…’
‘I can tell that….’ said Marty, laughing. ‘You don’t have to. OK.’
‘Yes. I am not going to.’
‘And I am not going to try to make you so, although I know when you’re thinking it.’
‘Right. This is a naughty thought. Does it tell you it is a naughty thought?’
‘It tells me that you don’t want to share it, that’s all.’
‘You can tell whether I am agitated about a line of thinking, a line of questioning.’
‘You got it, you got it.’
The E-meter scared me. My lesson in what lay behind Mr Hubbard’s tech was not over. We watched a clip of Tommy having a go at me back in 2007, relentlessly piling on the pressure: ‘Bigot… bigot… bigot,’ said Tommy, ‘I, Tommy Davis, say you, John Sweeney, is a bigot.’
Marty explained what was happening, if you had been trained in Scientology: ‘People have emotional buttons, things that set them off and they study you for that.’
‘Bigot,’ snapped Mike.
I’m not a bigot, I said. To call me a bigot annoys me because I am not a bigot.
‘I understand that but that’s…’ said Mike.
But hold on a second, I struggled to interrupt.
‘If I keep cutting you off like this,’ said Mike, ‘I will actually drive you nuts if every time you start to say something I cut you off…’
I tried to cut in, in vain.
‘That’s another…’ said Mike.
I babbled…
‘… if every time you start to say something I cut you off…’ said Mike.
Eerumpfg, I said.
‘…It’s another way of getting you so that you become emotionally upset…’
‘Yeah, it builds up like a dam,’ said Marty. ‘All these things you want to originate, keep getting cut off and it builds up like a dam and then finally explodes.’
‘And its one of these things…’ said Mike.
It’s very annoying, I said, I want to say something interesting.
‘No,’ said Mike, ‘you’re not allowed to say anything right now…’
‘Bigots are not allowed to talk,’ said Marty.
I collapsed in half-annoyed giggles, pleading that they stop. But again, this made me just a little bit afraid. The two Scientologists could tie me up on knots verbally and I get paid for talking the hind leg off a donkey.
Mike and Marty told me about black or reverse Scientology, about how its power to do good had been corrupted and turned to the dark side. ‘In Miscavige’s Church,’ said Marty, ‘you see Scientology and dynamics, good principles, being twisted around, used in a negative fashion. The whole thing is to help the guy communicate, to help the person freely communicate, to help the person you know examine his own life and to communicate about it. Reverse the process, you’re going to feel worse.’
Having met Russell Miller and read his heretical biography of L Ron Hubbard, and the books of other ex-Scientologists who felt they were victims of the Church under its founder, I am not convinced that there was a ‘White Scientology’ to be corrupted. But there is a clear difference in the openness with which Mike and Marty explain their faith, and their belief in L Ron Hubbard, and the flat refusal to do the same by David Miscavige.
And that extends to Xenu. When I asked Marty about the space alien stuff, he talked about Buddha reaching enlightenment underneath a tree and Jesus exorcising demons: ‘If you look at early Christianity, they fully believed in the existence of spirits amongst us. So this whole thing about the stuff you’re talking about, I call it a creation myth.’
Is Xenu true, I asked Mike?
‘That’s not what Scientology is about. It is a creation myth, no different than the creation myth of God creating the world in on
e day…’
It was six days, I interrupted, and then the seventh…
‘Six days, you know, whatever…’
These were not perfect answers, but both men answered my question about Xenu civilly, without incredulity or scorn. The problem is when you claim respect and tax relief for secret belief, for something holy or unholy you keep dark from the world.
Later, Mike and Marty and I went on a tour of the Church’s London properties. They were disgusted that they all looked empty, that the footfall was so sparse. For Mike and Marty, who truly believe in Scientology, this was the worst thing of all – worse than the abuse, The Hole, the obscene language – that the man in charge of the Church they used to love was driving people away from it.
We were spied on, filmed overtly and covertly: the usual.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Broken Lives
The man in the dark suit walks into the centre of the screen and welcomes you to the Church of Scientology. His presence is Magus-like, just this side of sinister, hinting at knowledge of dark matters, beyond ordinary human ken, the voice urgent, probing, concerned, the hair – and everybody’s hair was like this in the eighties – absurd: ‘Right this instant you are on the threshold of the next trillion years.’ Behind him, a steady stream of young, attractive people walk through two large doors, into some place the camera cannot go. ‘You will live it in shivering, agonized darkness. Or you will live it triumphantly in the light. The choice is yours, not ours.’
If you are a committed Trekkie you might recognise the actor from the movie Star Trek: Insurrection in which he plays a Tarlac officer – that’s a space alien with an enormous head with reptilian ridges to go – proclaiming: ‘Activating injector assembly… Injector assembly has separated.’
Larry Anderson, the man on the screen, is now out. He’s left after 33 years inside the Church. He’s an Out-Out, no longer a member of the Church or a Scientologist.
We met in Hollywood, probably the most over-rated place in the world, a fantasy factory parked in a smog-rich, overly-expensive industrial estate of dreams gone rancid. Not too far away on the street where the stars have their names in cement sad wannabes dress up as Batman and Robin, Cat-Woman, Spiderman and Freddie from the horror movie. They strut to and fro, barking at tourists who take their picture but don’t hand over five dollars. Behold our cheap celluloid gods… five bucks, please.
There was a time when the Church of the Stars love-bombed Hollywood, and Hollywood returned that affection. But the times, they are a-changing.
Larry has become an avenging angel, turning his voice against the Church. Back in 2007 he started to question the faith he once promoted: ‘I began to speculate that those early gains and wins as they say in Scientology were, in fact, the bait, the hook to bring you in. As a Scientologist you’re not only encouraged – you really had your arms twisted never to look at media. If you see a story on the Church, turn it off because it will only destroy the gains you’ve achieved up to now. Well, I said, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m going on-line.’ He trumpeted the word ‘on-line’ as if it was a statement of personal freedom, a super-hero breaking his chains, not an ordinary thing to do in the twenty-first century.
As a ‘public’ Scientologist, Larry did not get much of an insight into the innards of the Church. But when he became a presenter, advertising Scientology, he went to Gold in the desert to work on films to promote the Church. There, he saw things ordinary Scientologists never got to see: ‘The edict came down this film needs to be done tonight, it’s got to be done, so we were working through the night, one, three, five in the morning, and of course I might have gotten a very nice night’s sleep the night before and just had to work a long shift to get the film done but the Sea Org members who were the crew didn’t get a good night’s sleep the night before. They’re working seven days a week, often times 20 hours a day getting literally three, four hours of sleep. Here and there falling asleep like I saw on the set and then of course they’d get punished for that.’
Once, at Clearwater, at Christmas, Larry saw Sea Org members on the RPF, dressed in black, not talking to anyone, moving ‘like robots’: ‘They were scrubbing the stage floor with toothbrushes.’
As well as the treatment of the Sea Org members, Larry came to resent the constant high-pressure salesmanship: ‘Back in summer 2008 they released the basic Hubbard books again. Over the course of the 33 years I bought those books, I think, on four different occasions. Each new release we were given the story that they had now found corrections that weren’t integrated into the previous release and a chapter wasn’t there or some story about how we would now be getting fully official fully documented L Ron Hubbard basic books, the definitive works are now here.’
On inspection, the books turned out to be essentially the same: ‘It’s just another slick packaging thing and what drove me nuts was that the primary reason they were being re-released – and I was expecting some really clever story that they were now on their fourth release, you know, boy, they’d better come up with a great story – was that they discovered that the people who transcribed L Ron Hubbard’s audio tapes goofed. It was the most ludicrous explanation and yet everyone was standing up and doing standing ovations, “I can’t wait to shell out another 3000 dollars on my basic books again.”’ David Miscavige was doing the pitch.
After filming we went to a café to take a bite to eat with Larry. As we were relaxing, we noticed someone filming us: the usual.
A few miles up the coast lives Jason Beghe, star of GI Jane and a good number of American TV shows. I thought we were being tailed by a white Audi, but whoever was behind the wheel drove too fast. Beghe’s house has a fantastic view of the Pacific. I found myself spouting Keats, never a good sign: when stout Cortez, tumpety-tum, stood silent upon a peak in Darien…
‘Oh, Truth is beauty, beauty truth, and all of that nonsense,’ deflected Jason, nicely. He spent 13 years inside and around a million dollars. Now Jason thinks he was in a cult. He said it was hard to describe why he spent so long inside because ‘you lose your own ability to make a rational decision’. The starkest evidence of it being a cult was disconnection: ‘I can’t think of many religions where such a large percentage of people are willing to dump their own son, daughter, best friend, wife, husband because they won’t have Scientology anymore. That’s going too far. It’s insanity to me.’
I told him that Tommy Davis said that disconnection is a lie.
Jason talked about the day when he finally left, the cut-off was sheer: ‘Nobody ever talked to me again. All my old friends were gone. My son, Bix, four years old in a Scientology pre-school, kicked out, no friends, boom!, cause he was connected to me. It was like boom! I went to call some people and say, “Hey,” and they wouldn’t take my call. And if I left a message, never returned, and these are people that would come to me, hug me, kiss me and tell me how much they love me and blah blah blah. So that’s disconnection. My wife was made to disconnect from her mother. That’s my personal experience. I know many, many, many, many people that were forced to disconnect.’
What Tommy was saying about disconnection not happening was ‘just a lie.’
The mind-holes inside the Church went deep: ‘We’re these wonderful, powerful, superhuman OTs [Operating Thetans] and Clears and we’re well beyond anyone else. Then why is it that you can’t even see a differing opinion on the internet? That to me is a show of just incredible weakness. These people are not stupid but they go well, OK, and then not read the newspapers. If you can’t handle a newspaper, how OT are you?’
Jason, who plays a psychiatrist on the television but freely admits he’s no expert, said: ‘Even the most degraded criminal will protect his mother. These people drop mothers like a hot potato because they have decided that this philosophy or the superstructure of the Church itself is more important. So they say: “Well, you’re dead to me.” How do you make that leap? It’s something like mind control. It’s totally unnatural, it’s hypnotism, I
don’t know what the hell it is but it’s something. The bottom line is handle or disconnect. In other words get them to behave in a way that they’re not a danger to me or the group or else dump them.’
Our mutual acquaintance cropped up: ‘Tommy was one of the most beautiful, sweet and enthusiastic guys. He liked to have fun, and was I think a person worthy of admiration. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he could have been out partying with Paris Hilton and he decided he was going to dedicate his life to helping others for no money. That’s a personality trait that’s rare. So his intention is spectacular, very admirable person.’
Tommy was weird with me, I said, off camera, very nice, cameras around, aggressive.
‘I’ve done a lot of acting scenes with people and you get to know when someone’s really there and when they’re acting. He’s not good at doing that. I don’t buy it. Looks manufactured to me. It smacks of “methinks he doth protest too much”. It looks like an admission of guilt to me.’
He was faking it?
‘It’s much worse. For Tommy’s sake I wish he knew he was lying but he’s convinced “I’m telling the truth” which is further along the line of brainwashing. Instead of having a tool to use, you are used by the tool.’
Jason explained that in 1999 he had a terrible car accident, broke bones, broke his neck and fell into a coma for three and a half weeks. Tommy Davis and another Scientologist from the Celebrity Centre came to the hospital: ‘24 hours one of them was always by my bedside’.
Later, Jason discovered that Tommy was encouraging his family and doctors not to use ‘certain drugs – Psyche drugs – that may disqualify me from being eligible to continue in Scientology. Don’t construe that as evil. Construe that as love: Jason needs Scientology.’
There is compelling evidence that L Ron Hubbard when he died was full of psychiatric drugs, I said. Why on earth should the Church continue to challenge the use of psychiatric drugs in the way that they do?
The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology Page 27