by Jon Ronson
“Saint Hill?” I said.
“L. Ron Hubbard’s old manor house,” Brian said.
Saint Hill Manor—L. Ron Hubbard’s home from 1959 to 1966—stands palatial and impeccably preserved in the East Grinstead countryside, thirty-five miles south of London. There are pristine pillars and priceless twelfth-century Islamic tiles and summer rooms and winter rooms and a room covered from floor to ceiling in a mid-twentieth-century mural of great British public figures portrayed as monkeys—strange, formally funny satire from long ago commissioned by a previous owner—and a large modern extension, built by Scientology volunteers, in the shape of a medieval castle. Little keepsakes from Hubbard’s life, like his cassette recorder and personalized writing paper and a pith helmet, sit on side tables.
I pulled up assuming Brian would be there to put me in a room so I could quietly study the documents detailing the early days of the Church’s war on psychiatry. But as I turned the corner, I saw to my surprise that a welcoming committee of some of the world’s leading Scientologists had flown thousands of miles with the express purpose of greeting me and showing me around. They were waiting for me on the gravel driveway, dressed in immaculate suits, smiling in anticipation.
There had been sustained negative media reports about the Church those past weeks and someone high up had clearly decided that I may be the journalist to turn the tide. What had happened was three former high-ranking staff members—Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder, and Amy Scobee—had a few weeks earlier made some startling accusations against their leader, and L. Ron Hubbard’s successor, David Miscavige. They said he routinely punished his top executives for being unsatisfactory Ideas People by slapping them, punching them, “beating the living fuck” out of them, kicking them when they were on the floor, hitting them in the face, choking them until their faces went purple, and unexpectedly forcing them to play an extreme all-night version of musical chairs.
“The fact is,” said the Church’s chief spokesperson, Tommy Davis, who had flown from Los Angeles to see me, “yes, people were hit. Yes, people were kicked while they were on the floor and choked until their faces went purple, but the perpetrator wasn’t Mr. Miscavige. It was Marty Rathbun himself!”
(Marty Rathbun has, I later learned, admitted to committing those acts of violence, but says he was ordered to by David Miscavige. The Church denies that claim.)
Tommy said that I, unlike most journalists, was a freethinker, not in the pay of anti-Scientologist-vested interests and willing to entertain unexpected realities. He handed me a copy of the in-house Scientology magazine, Freedom, which referred to the three people who had made the accusations against David Miscavige as The Kingpin, The Conman, and The Adulteress. The Adulteress was in fact “a repeat adulteress” who refused to “curb her wanton sexual behavior,” perpetrated “five incidents of extramarital indiscretions,” and “was removed from the Church for ecclesiastical crimes.”
I looked up from the magazine.
“What about the extreme all-night version of musical chairs?” I asked.
There was a short silence.
“Yes, well, Mr. Miscavige did make us do that,” said Tommy. “But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was reported. Anyway. Let’s give you a tour so we can educate you on what Scientology is really about.”
Tommy handed me over to Bob Keenan, my tour guide. “I’m L. Ron Hubbard’s personal PR rep in the UK,” he said. He was an Englishman, a former firefighter who had, he said, discovered Scientology “after I broke my back while putting out a fire at a gyppo’s flat in East London. There was a donkey in one of the bedrooms. I saw it, turned the corner, and fell through the floor. When I was recovering, I read Dianetics [Hubbard’s self-help book] and it helped me with the pain.”
The manor house was immaculate in a way that manor houses rarely are these days. It was as spotless and sparkling as manor houses in costume dramas set during those long-ago days when the British gentry had real power and unlimited money. The only stain I saw anywhere was in the Winter Room, where a small number of the gleaming marble floor tiles were slightly discolored.
“This is where Ron had his Coca-Cola machine,” explained Bob. He smiled. “Ron loved Coca-Cola. He drank it all the time. That was his thing. Anyway, one day the machine leaked some syrup. That’s what the stain is. There’s been a lot of debate about whether we should clean it up. I say leave it. It’s a nice thing.”
“Like a relic,” I said.
“Right,” said Bob.
“A kind of Coca-Cola Turin shroud,” I said.
“Whatever,” said Bob.
Anti-Scientologists believe that the religion and all that is done in its name, including its anti-psychiatry wing, are nothing less than a manifestation of L. Ron Hubbard’s madness. They say he was paranoid and depressed (he would apparently at times cry uncontrollably and throw things against the wall and scream). Tommy and Bob said Hubbard was a genius and a great humanitarian. They pointed to his record as a world-class Boy Scout (“The youngest Eagle Scout in America,” said Bob, “he earned twenty-one merit badges”), pilot, adventurer (the story goes that he once single-handedly saved a bear from drowning), an incredibly prolific sci-fi author (he could write an entire best-selling novel on a single overnight train journey), philosopher, sailor, guru, and whistle-blowing scourge of evil psychiatrists. They say Hubbard was the very first man to reveal that psychiatrists were dosing patients with massive amounts of LSD and electroconvulsive therapy in secret CIA-funded attempts to create brainwashed assassins. He published his account of the experiments in 1969 and it wasn’t until June 1975 that The Washington Post announced to an unsuspecting world that these programs (code-named MK-ULTRA) existed.
A person drugged and shocked can be ordered to kill and who to kill and how to do it and what to say afterwards. Scientologists, being technically superior to psychiatrists and about a hundred light-years above him morally, objects seriously to the official indifference to drug-electric-shock treatments. . . . Someday the police will have to take the psychiatrist in hand. The psychiatrist is being found out.
—L. RON HUBBARD, “PAIN-DRUG-HYPNOSIS,” 1969
They say Hubbard came to believe that a conspiracy of vested interests, namely the psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries, was behind the political attacks against him because his self-help principles of Dianetics (that we’re all laden by “engrams,” painful memories from past lives, and when we clear ourselves of them, we can be invincible, we can regrow teeth, cure blindness, become sane) meant that nobody would ever need to visit a psychiatrist or take an antidepressant again.
A Church video biography of Hubbard’s life says, “L. Ron Hubbard was probably the smartest man that has walked the face of this Earth. We had Jesus, we had Moses, we had Mohammed, all the great people. L. Ron Hubbard is one of this kind.”
The final stop on my guided tour was L. Ron Hubbard’s bedroom.
“The very last night he spent in this bed,” Bob said, “was the night of December thirtieth, 1966. The next night, New Year’s Eve, he left England, never to return.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The research he was conducting at the time was just too . . .” Bob fell silent. He gave me a solemn look.
“Are you saying his research was getting just too heavy and he had to leave England in fear for his life?” I asked.
“The conclusions he was coming to . . .” Bob said. An ominous tone had crept into his voice.
“L. Ron Hubbard was never in fear,” interjected Tommy Davis, sharply. “He would never flee from anywhere. It wouldn’t be right for people to think he fled. He only ever did anything on his own terms.”
“He left because he wanted a safe haven,” clarified Bill Walsh, one of the Church’s lead attorneys who had flown in from Washington, D.C., to meet me.
“What was the nature of the research?” I asked.
There was a silence. And then Bob quietly said, “The antisocial personality.”
The Antis
ocial Personality
[This type of personality] cannot feel any sense of remorse or shame. They approve only of destructive actions. They appear quite rational. They can be very convincing.
—L. RON HUBBARD, Introduction to Scientology Ethics, 1968
Hubbard, while living at Saint Hill, began to preach that his enemies, such as the American Psychiatric Association, were Antisocial Personalities, malevolent spirits obsessed with focusing their evil onto him. Their malice had fermented over countless lifetimes, many millions of years, and it was a powerful force indeed. He wrote that it was the duty of every Scientologist to “ruin them utterly . . . use black propaganda to destroy reputation.” Although he later canceled the order (“It causes bad public relations,” he wrote), it was this uncompromising attitude—“We want at least one bad mark on every psychiatrist in England, a murder, an assault, or a rape or more than one. . . . There is not one institutional psychiatrist alive who, by ordinary criminal law, could not be arraigned and convicted of extortion, mayhem and murder”—that led to the formation of the anti-psychiatry wing, the CCHR, in 1969.
The CCHR visualized psychiatry as Hubbard had depicted it, as a Dark Empire that had existed for millennia, and themselves as a ragtag rebel force tasked with defeating the Goliath.
And they have won some epic victories. There was, for example, their campaign back in the 1970s and 1980s against the Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey. He ran a small, private, suburban psychiatric hospital in Sydney. Patients would turn up suffering from anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obesity, premenstrual syndrome, and so on. Harry Bailey would greet them and ask them to swallow some tablets. Sometimes the patients knew what was coming, but sometimes they didn’t. To those who asked what the pills were for, he’d say, “Oh, it is normal practice.”
So they’d take them and fall into a deep coma.
Harry Bailey believed that while his patients were in their comas, their minds would cure themselves of whichever mental disorders afflicted them. But somewhere between twenty-six and eighty-five of his patients sank too deep and died. Some choked on their own vomit, others suffered heart attacks and brain damage and pneumonia and deep vein thrombosis. The Scientologists eventually got wind of the scandal and set a team onto investigating Bailey, encouraging survivors to sue and the courts to prosecute, which they did, much to the indignation of Harry Bailey, who believed his work to be pioneering.
In September 1985, when it became clear he was destined for jail, he wrote a note: “Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won.” Then he went out to his car and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, washed down with beer.
Harry Bailey was dead and hopefully not making use of the afterlife to arm himself with yet more malevolent power to mete out to the human race during some dreadful future lifetime.
When I got home from Saint Hill, I watched the CCHR video, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. Much of it is a well-researched catalog of abuses perpetrated by psychiatrists throughout history. Here was the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was “the desire to run away from slavery” and the cure was to “whip the devil out of them” as a preventative measure. Here was the neurologist Walter Freeman hammering an ice pick through a patient’s eye socket sometime during the 1950s. Freeman would travel America in his “lobotomobile” (a sort of camper van) enthusiastically lobotomizing wherever he was allowed. Here was behavioral psychologist John Watson spraying a baby with some unidentified clear liquid that I hoped wasn’t acid, but by that point in the DVD I wouldn’t have put anything past those bastards.
But then it veered into speculative territory. Here was Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner apparently cruelly isolating his baby daughter Deborah in a Perspex box for a year. The archive actually captured her looking quite happy in the box, and I later did some fact-checking and discovered she’s contended throughout her life that the box was basically just a crib and she was hardly ever in there anyway and her father was in fact a lovely man.
The DVD commentary said, “In every city, every state, every country, you will find psychiatrists committing rape, sexual abuse, murder, and fraud.”
A few days later a letter arrived from Tony in Broadmoor. “This place is awful at night time, Jon,” he wrote. “Words cannot express the atmosphere. I noticed that the wild daffodils were in bloom this morning. I felt like running through them as I used to in my childhood with my mum.”
Tony had included in the package copies of his files. So I got to read the exact words he used to convince psychiatrists back in 1998 that he was mentally ill. The Dennis Hopper Blue Velvet stuff he had told me about was right there—how he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart and a love letter was a bullet from a gun and if you received a love letter from him, you’d go straight to hell—but there was a lot more. He’d really gone to town. He told the psychiatrists that the CIA was following him, and that people in the street didn’t have real eyes, they had black eyes where their eyes should be, and perhaps the way to make the voices in his head go away was to hurt someone, to take a man hostage and stick a pencil in his eye. He said he was considering stealing an airplane because he no longer got a buzz from stealing cars. He said he enjoyed taking things that belonged to other people because he liked the idea of making them suffer. He said hurting people was better than sex.
I wasn’t sure which movies those ideas had been plagiarized from. Or even if they had been plagiarized from movies. I felt the ground shift under my feet. Suddenly I was a little on the side of the psychiatrists. Tony must have come over as extremely creepy back then.
There was another page in his file, a description of the crime he committed back in 1997. The victim was a homeless man, an alcoholic named Graham who happened to be sitting on a nearby bench. He apparently made “an inappropriate comment” about the ten-year-old daughter of one of Tony’s friends. The comment was something to do with the length of her dress. Tony told him to shut up. Graham threw a punch at him. Tony retaliated by kicking him. Graham fell over. And that would have been it—Tony later said—had Graham stayed silent. But Graham didn’t. Instead he said, “Is that all you’ve got?”
Tony “flipped.” He kicked Graham seven or eight times in the stomach and groin. He left him, walked back to his friends, and had another drink. He then returned to Graham—who was still lying motionless on the floor—bent down and repeatedly head-butted and kicked him again. He kicked him again in the face and walked away.
I remembered that list of movies Tony said he plagiarized to demonstrate he was mentally ill. One was A Clockwork Orange, which begins with a gang of thugs kicking a homeless man while he was on the ground.
My phone rang. I recognized the number. It was Tony. I didn’t answer it.
A week passed and then the e-mail I had been waiting for arrived. It was from Professor Anthony Maden, the chief clinician at Tony’s Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder unit inside Broadmoor.
“Tony,” his e-mail read, “did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.”
He was sure of it, he said, and so were many other psychiatrists who’d met Tony during the past few years. It was now the consensus. Tony’s delusions—the ones he’d presented when he had been on remand in jail—just, in retrospect, didn’t ring true. They were too lurid, too clichéd. Plus the minute he got admitted to Broadmoor and he looked around and saw what a hellhole he’d got himself into, the symptoms just vanished.
“Oh!” I thought, pleasantly surprised. “Good! That’s great!”
I had liked Tony when I met him but I’d found myself feeling warier of him those past days so it was nice to have his story verified by an expert.
But then I read Professor Maden’s next line: “Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psyc
hopathy.”
I looked at the e-mail. “Tony’s a psychopath?” I thought.
I didn’t know very much at all about psychopaths back then, only the story James had told me about Essi Viding back when I was solving the Being or Nothingness mystery: She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them. So I didn’t know much about psychopaths, but I did know this: it sounded worse.
I e-mailed Professor Maden: “Isn’t that like that scene in the movie Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg pretends to be a psychic and then it turns out that she actually can talk to the dead?”
“No,” he e-mailed back. “It isn’t like that Whoopi Goldberg scene. Tony faked mental illness. That’s when you have hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn’t come and go. It is how the person is.”
Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.
“There is no doubt about Tony’s diagnosis,” Professor Maden’s e-mail concluded.
Tony rang again. I didn’t answer.
“Classic psychopath!” said Essi Viding.
There was a silence.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah!” she said. “How he turned up to meet you! It’s classic psychopath!”