A decade later, however, Deborah went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and learned that the previous ruling no longer applied. If she wanted to do more training, she would have to confront her parents’ mistakes. The church recommended that she take the Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons course.
Many Scientologists have taken the same course. Deborah’s friend Kelly Preston had taken it as well. “I was PTS, but I didn’t realize it, and so I was told, ‘You need to be on PTS/SP,’ ” Preston later recalled in her interview for Celebrity magazine. She discovered that her life was full of Suppressive Persons. “Being an artist and having a lot of theta, you really attract those type of people,” Preston said. (“Theta” is a Scientology term for life force.) “I ended up having to handle or disconnect from quite a few different people.”
It took Deborah a year to complete the course, but it didn’t change her parents’ status. She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. They put her on another program that took two more years to finish. Still, nothing changed. If she failed to “handle” her parents—by persuading them to make amends to the church—she would have to disconnect not only from them but also from everyone who spoke to them, including her siblings. She realized, “It was that, or else I had to give up being a Scientologist.” The fact that Paul refused to disconnect from her parents posed yet another conflict.
According to the church, Deborah’s parents had been part of a class-action lawsuit against Scientology by disaffected members in 1987, which was dismissed the following year.2 The church required them to denounce the anti-Scientology group and offer a “token” restitution. That meant performing community service and following a rehabilitation course, called A to E, for penitents seeking to get back into the church’s good graces; it includes repaying debts, taking additional courses, and making public declarations of error. Deborah told her parents that if they wanted to remain in contact with her they had to follow the church’s procedures. Her parents, worried that they would also be cut off from their grandson, agreed to perform community service. For three months they delivered food in a Meals on Wheels program in Los Angeles. But the church wasn’t satisfied. Deborah was told that if she maintained contact with her parents she would be labeled a Potential Trouble Source—a designation that would alienate her from the entire Scientology community and render her ineligible for further training. A senior official counseled her to agree to disconnect from her parents and have them formally branded SPs. “Until then, they won’t turn around and recognize their responsibilities,” he said.
“Okay, fine,” Deborah responded. “Go ahead and declare them. Maybe it’ll get better.”
The official then granted Deborah permission to begin upper-level coursework in Clearwater.
In August 2006, a formal notice on yellow parchment, called a “goldenrod,” was posted at the Celebrity Centre declaring Deborah’s parents Suppressive Persons, explaining that they had withdrawn the money they had placed on deposit for future coursework and that they had associated with “squirrels”—that is, they received unauthorized Scientology counseling. A month later, Mary Benjamin sent her daughter a letter. “We tried to do what you asked, Deborah. We worked the whole months of July & Aug. on A-E.” They gave the church back the $2,500 for the courses that they never intended to take. After all that, she continued, a church adjudicator had told them to hand out three hundred copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s booklet “The Way to Happiness” to libraries and to document each exchange with photographs. Her parents had had enough. “If this can’t be resolved, we will have to say Good-Bye to you & James will lose his Grand-Parents,” her mother wrote. “This is ridiculous.”
In April 2007, Deborah received a letter from the lawyer who represented her parents, threatening a lawsuit for the right to visit their grandson. Deborah had to hire an attorney. Eventually, the church relented. Deborah was summoned to the Celebrity Centre and shown a statement rescinding the decision, although she wasn’t allowed to have a copy of it.
WHILE HE WAS RESEARCHING on the Internet, Haggis came upon a series of articles that had run in the St. Petersburg Times3 beginning in June 2009, titled “The Truth Rundown.” The paper has maintained a special focus on Scientology, since the church maintains such a commanding presence in Clearwater, which is adjacent to St. Petersburg. Although the paper and the church have frequently been at odds, the only interview that David Miscavige has ever given to a newspaper resulted in a rather flattering profile in the Times in 1998. (Since then, Miscavige has not spoken to the press at all.)
In the series, Haggis learned for the first time that several of the top managers of the church had quietly defected—including Marty Rathbun. For several years, the word in the Scientology community was that Rathbun had died of cancer. Mike Rinder, the chief spokesperson, and Tom De Vocht, the former landlord of all the church properties in Clearwater, were also speaking out about the abuses that were taking place inside the top tier of management—mainly at the hands of the church leader. Amy Scobee, who had overseen the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, pointed out that the reason no one outside of the executive circles knew of the abuse, even other Scientologists like Haggis, was that people were terrified of Miscavige—and not just physically. Their greatest fear was expulsion. “You don’t have any money. You don’t have job experience. You don’t have anything. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you.”
Tommy Davis had produced nine senior church executives who told the Times that the abuse had never taken place. Dan Sherman, the church’s official Hubbard biographer and Miscavige’s speechwriter, recounted a scene in which he observed Miscavige talking to an injured sparrow. “It was immensely tender,” Sherman told the reporters.
Much of the abuse being alleged had taken place at Gold Base. Haggis had visited the place only once, in the early 1980s, when its existence was still a closely held secret. That was when he was preparing to direct the Scientology commercial that was ultimately rejected. At first glance, it seemed like a spa, beautiful and restful; but he had been put off by the uniforms, the security, and the militarized feel of the place.
“At the top of the church, people were whacking folks about like Laurel and Hardy,” Haggis said. He was embarrassed to admit that he had never even asked himself where Rathbun and Rinder had gone. He decided to call Rathbun, who was now living on Galveston Bay in South Texas. Although the two men had never met, they were well known to each other. After being one of the most powerful figures in Scientology, Rathbun was scraping together a living by freelancing stories to local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark. He figured that South Texas was about as far from Los Angeles and Clearwater as he could hope to get. Haggis was floored when he learned that Rathbun had had to escape. He was also surprised to learn that other friends, such as Jim Logan, the man who brought him into the church so long ago on the street corner in Ontario, had also fled or been declared Suppressive Persons. One of Haggis’s closest friends in the church hierarchy, Bill Dendiu, told Haggis that he had escaped from Gold Base by driving a car—actually, an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through the fence. He still had scars on his forehead to show for that.
“What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?” Haggis wondered.
He also came across a number of anti-Scientology websites, including Exscientologykids.com, which was created by Jenna Miscavige Hill, the leader’s niece, who joined the Sea Org when she was twelve. For her and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the organization, leaving them ill prepared for life outside the church. Jenna says that for much of her early life, she was kept in a camp with other Sea Org children and little adult supervision. They rarely saw their parents. “We ran ourselves completely,” she recalled.
For several years, Haggis had been working with a charity he established to set up schools in Haiti. These stories reminded him of the child slaves he had enco
untered in that country. “They were ten, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their parents go along with this!” he said of the Sea Org children. “And they work morning, noon and night.… Scrubbing pots, manual labor—that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me!”
AFTER TOM CRUISE’S BEHAVIOR on Oprah and the Today show, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owns Paramount Studios, chose not to renew Cruise’s deal. “He turned off all women,” Redstone explained. “He was embarrassing the studio. And he was costing us a lot of money.” Cruise and his longtime producing partner, Paula Wagner, worked out a deal with MGM to resurrect the struggling United Artists studio. Soon after that, Wagner approached Haggis, offering him a very generous deal. He wrote one script for them, a big-budget children’s movie, but the studio was so financially pressed that it couldn’t afford to produce it.
In January 2008, just as it seemed that the derision that was directed at Cruise was about to die down, a video was posted on the Internet. It was a taped interview with the star that preceded his acceptance of the Freedom Medal of Valor four years earlier. Wearing a black turtleneck, with the theme music from Mission: Impossible playing in the background, Cruise spoke to Scientologists in language they understood. “Being a Scientologist, you can look at someone and know absolutely that you can help them,” Cruise said. “So for me it really is KSW, and it’s something that I don’t mince words with that—with anything!—but that policy with me has really gone—phist!” He made a vigorous gesture. “Boy! There’s a time I went through when I said, you know what, when I read it I just went pooh! That’s it! That’s exactly it!”
The video was placed on YouTube and viewed by millions who had no idea what he was talking about. Cruise’s urgency came off as the ravings of a wild-eyed fanatic, but to Scientologists it was a sermon they had heard many times. “KSW” refers to a policy letter that Hubbard wrote in 1965 titled “Keeping Scientology Working.” In the letter Hubbard reprimanded his followers for straying from the narrow path he had laid out for them. “When somebody enrols [sic], consider he or she has joined up for the duration of the universe—never permit an ‘open-minded’ approach,” Hubbard writes. “If they’re aboard, they’re here on the same terms as the rest of us—win or die in the attempt.” Hubbard concludes: “The whole agonized future of this planet, every Man, Woman and Child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology.”
The church instantly began taking down the video from the Internet, threatening lawsuits because of copyright violations. A loose coalition of Internet hackers who called themselves Anonymous seized on the issue. “We were a bunch of kids who didn’t care about anything,” Gregg Housh, a computer-repair technician in Boston who acts as an unofficial spokesperson for the group, recalled. Until then, they had never protested anything, but they considered the Internet their turf and were offended that the church would attempt to control what they watched. In truth, they knew little about Scientology, but the more they learned, the more aroused they became.
“We shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form,” Anonymous declared in a creepy video of its own. “We are anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.” Some members of the Anonymous coalition waged denial-of-service attacks on church computers, shutting down their websites for an extended period. On February 10, 2008, Anonymous organized protests in front of Scientology churches and missions in a hundred cities across the world. Many of the demonstrators were wearing what has now become the signature of the Anonymous movement—the Guy Fawkes mask, taken from the film V for Vendetta.
At the center of the controversy was the beleaguered Tom Cruise. An unflattering, unauthorized biography by the British writer Andrew Morton was published days after the YouTube video of Cruise appeared, creating a new round of headlines—“Cruise Out of Control,” “Explosive Claims on Cruise Baby,” “German Historian Likens Cruise Speech to Goebbels”—that were intensely personal and insulting. Questions of his religion, his sexual orientation, his relationship with his wife, even the paternity of his daughter were laid out like a banquet for public consumption. Several top executives at United Artists, including Cruise’s partner, Paula Wagner, decided to leave.
Haggis was in his office in Santa Monica when he got a call from Cruise. He hadn’t heard a word from him since writing the apology for his wisecrack to Spielberg. Haggis still had his deal at United Artists, which Cruise was running. Now the star had a favor to ask. He wanted to gather a group of top Scientologists in Hollywood—Kirstie Alley, Anne Archer, and Haggis—to go on Oprah or Larry King Live to denounce the attacks on Cruise as religious persecution. Haggis told Cruise that was a terrible idea. He said that Cruise should stop trying to be a mouthpiece for the church and go back to doing what he does best—being a movie star. People love him for that, not for having the answers to all of life’s problems. He also advised the star to have a sense of humor about himself—something that is often lacking in Scientology. Instead of constantly going on the attack, he might simply say, “Yeah, I get that it sounds crazy, but it works for me.”4
Cruise didn’t want to hear what Haggis had to say at the time, but soon after this conversation, he took a wildly comic turn in the Ben Stiller film Tropic Thunder, playing a profane studio executive who reminded a number of Hollywood insiders of Sumner Redstone. He also went back on the Today show for another interview with Matt Lauer. This time, he was chastened and introspective. “I came across as arrogant,” he admitted, when reflecting on their previous interview three years earlier. “That’s not who I am. That’s not the person I am.… I’m here to entertain people. That’s who I am and what I want to do.” Outside the windows of the studio, a crowd of people in the plaza of Rockefeller Center waved and blew kisses.
HAGGIS WAS CASTING The Next Three Days in the summer of 2009, and he asked Jason Beghe to read for the part of a detective. Beghe’s best-known film role was as the love interest for Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. In the late nineties, when Haggis had worked with the gravel-voiced actor on a CBS series, Family Law, Beghe had been an occasional front man for Scientology. He had come to the church, like so many others, through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. In old promotional materials for the church, Beghe is quoted as saying that Scientology is “a rocket ride to spiritual freedom.” He says that Miscavige once called him “the poster boy for Scientology.”
Paul Haggis on the set of The Next Three Days, in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, train yard
“I just want you to know I’m no longer in Scientology,” Beghe told Haggis when he called. “Actually, I’m one of its most outspoken critics. The church would be very unhappy if you hire me.”
“Nobody tells me who I cast,” Haggis responded, but he decided to look at the lengthy video Beghe had posted on the Internet, in which he denounces the church as “destructive and a rip-off.” Haggis thought the actor had gone over the edge, but he asked if they could talk.
The two men met at Patrick’s Roadhouse, a pleasantly shabby coffee shop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Beghe was calmer than he had been in the video, which he now called “a snapshot of me having been out only three months.” He could see that Haggis was troubled. Even though Beghe had renounced the church, he continued to use Scientology when dealing with former members. In his several meetings with Haggis, he employed techniques based on Hubbard’s Ethics Conditions. These range from Confusion at the bottom and ascend through Treason, Enemy, Doubt, Liability, Emergency, and so on, up to Power. Each of the conditions has a specific set of steps to follow in order to advance to a higher state. Assuming that Haggis was in the condition of Doubt, Beghe knew that the proper formula required him to provide information.
He told Haggis that in the late nineties he began having emotional problems. The church prescribed more auditing and coursework. In retrospect, Beghe felt th
at it had done no good. “I was paying money for them to fuck me up,” he said, estimating that he had spent as much as $600,000 in the process, and nearly $1 million in his thirteen-year Scientology career. When he finally decided to leave the church, he told Tommy Davis that the church was in a condition of Liability to him. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution. But now the situation was reversed, Beghe maintained. He proposed that the church buy some property and lease it to him at a negligible rate. “You guys don’t have any policies to make up the damage, so I’m doing this for your own good—and for mine,” he explained to Davis and others. “Because I don’t have a policy of taking it in the ass.”5
While talking to Haggis, Beghe was reluctant to use the word “brainwashing”—“whatever the fuck that is”—but he did say that somehow his mind had been taken over. “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are L. Ron Hubbard’s,” he explained. “You think you’re becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist.”
Haggis was disturbed by Beghe’s account of what had happened after he left the church. He claimed that none of his Scientology friends would talk to him, his son had been kicked out of school, he was being followed by private investigators and threatened with lawsuits. Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true believer as some members, he didn’t nurse the same sense of betrayal. “I didn’t feel that some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would find L. Ron Hubbard and his thought,” he said. But he did feel that he had been cautioned.
“TOMMY,” HAGGIS’S LETTER of August 19, 2009, abruptly begins. “As you know, for ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.”
Going Clear Page 39