Inside Scientology

by Janet Reitman

  Reporters from two of the local newspapers, the Clearwater Sun and the St. Petersburg Times, were equally puzzled and spent the next several months digging for information about the suspicious new church. Finally, in January 1976, a St. Petersburg Times reporter named Bette Orsini began to close in on the truth: the United Churches of Florida was really a front for the controversial and wealthy Church of Scientology.* Before Orsini could break the story, church leaders, having been tipped off, decided to make the announcement themselves; they sent a representative to reassure the community that the church meant no harm and that its members, who by now were streaming into Clearwater, were law-abiding citizens who simply wanted to practice their religion in peace.

  But the people of Clearwater did not take kindly to this intrusion. Most resented the clandestine way that Scientologists had arrived and wondered about the church's true motives. These suspicions did not go away, particularly once the Church of Scientology filed lawsuits against both Cazares and the Clearwater Sun (and threatened to sue the St. Petersburg Times ), accusing them of libel and, in the case of Cazares, violation of the church's civil rights. But what alienated the people of Clearwater most was the Scientologists' insularity: the strange shirt-and-tie formality of their clothes; the secretiveness with which they went about their business; the strange penchant they had for suing anyone who spoke negatively of them or even asked a simple question about them or their practices.

  Everything the Scientologists did seemed to put them at odds with the local community. The church purchased property from local sellers but refused to pay taxes. They closed off the Fort Harrison to the public. In March 1976, a couple who had run a gift shop inside the Fort Harrison sued for loss of business after the church abruptly shut down their air conditioning, telephone, and alarm system and refused to restore the services.

  Then, in the fall of 1978, word began to leak out of Washington, D.C., that Scientology had far broader plans for Clearwater than simply buying property. During the FBI raid that uncovered Operation Snow White, the feds discovered documents that detailed the Church of Scientology's plans to "take over" the sleepy Florida city, a project code-named Operation Goldmine. As the St. Petersburg Times reported it, "Church functionaries were directed 'to fully investigate the Clearwater city and county area so we can distinguish our friends from our enemies and handle as needed.'"

  Church officials were directed to identify key media and political leaders and either win their allegiance or, if that failed, discredit them through a variety of covert tactics. Reporters at the St. Petersburg Times and the Clearwater Sun who had investigated Scientology were put on an "enemies list." This list also included the legendary publisher of the Times, Nelson Poynter, and the paper's editor, Eugene Patterson; Mayor Cazares and the Clearwater chief of police were also cited, among others. Scientology's "covert agents" had taken jobs at local newspapers, law firms, community agencies, and even the Greater Clearwater Chamber of Commerce. When Clearwater citizens became aware of this plot, they took it as a declaration of war. "People were in a frenzy against Scientology when those documents started coming out," recalled the Washington Post writer and editor Richard Leiby, who was then a reporter for the Clearwater Sun. "They thought they had a crazy cult in their midst."

  This was no small thing in 1978, the year of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. The story of the group's mass suicide was horrifying: a paranoid cult leader, Jim Jones, urging his followers to drink vats of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, leaving more than nine hundred people dead, their bodies bloated by exposure to the sun. It was one of the most heavily covered stories of the 1970s, leading the news for months after the November 1978 incident. "Cult of Death" was the label that both Time and Newsweek gave to Jonestown. In Clearwater, people looked at the Scientologists and wondered what was next.

  In the wake of the "Clearwater Conspiracy," as the CBS news program 60 Minutes dubbed the plot, thousands of Clearwater residents took to the streets in protest, demanding that the Church of Scientology leave town. Mayor Cazares, who'd resigned in 1978 and learned through the Snow White documents that Scientologists intent on ruining his political career had once tried to frame him as the driver in a hit-and-run accident in Washington, D.C., called upon the federal government to be wary, warning that the Church of Scientology was a "politically fascist organization." Richard Tenney, one of the Clearwater city commissioners, spearheaded a concerned citizens group, Save Sparkling Clearwater, that held anti-Scientology rallies in public stadiums and parks. (In one particularly heated exchange, local Scientologists, infuriated by the vociferous criticism of editorialists at the Clearwater Sun, marched on the paper's downtown headquarters dressed as Nazi storm troopers, an alarming sight for the city's elderly Jewish population.)

  But Scientology's acquisition of properties in Clearwater continued. "We knew that no one, government or individual, could beat us legally and make us leave town," said Larry Brennan, who, arguing that Scientology's services were religious in nature, had helped persuade the state of Florida to grant the Scientology organization a "consumer's certificate of exemption," which recognized it as a religious institution and exempted it from paying, or charging, sales tax on its courses or auditing processes. "After that, we knew we could buy whatever buildings we wanted using whatever corporate shell games we wanted as we were now out of the closet and legally safeguarded," Brennan said.

  By 1980, the church owned four hotels and three office complexes, assessed at $8.9 million, brokering the deals in cash. About fifteen hundred Scientologists now lived in the area full-time, it was estimated, while another five hundred or so well-off Scientologists streamed into Flag annually from all over the world, spending weeks, and sometimes months, luxuriating at the Fort Harrison, with its newly renovated rooms, its lobby decked with crystal chandeliers, and its swimming pool. Church officials, hoping to combat the negative publicity caused by the Snow White revelations, reversed previous policy and threw open the doors of the Fort Harrison. With great fanfare, the church announced a downtown revitalization project and also began donating heavily to local charities. By the fall of 1980, the Clearwater Sun had to conclude that "Scientology is going to be part of Clearwater for a very long time."

  Over the next decade, Scientologists continued to face significant opposition. In May 1982, the city's new mayor, Charles LeCher, held public hearings to probe Scientology's activities in Clearwater, which revealed shocking tales: break-ins and infiltration of government offices, local charities, and community organizations, as well as incidents of child neglect, maggot-infested food fed to staff, and an unreported hepatitis outbreak at the Fort Harrison. "I'm not here to complain about what the church has done to me," said a former church executive named Scott Mayer. "I'm here to really impress upon you what you're actually dealing with, the magnitude of what you're dealing with."

  Scientology, nonetheless, continued its public relations campaign. The church hosted more open houses at the Fort Harrison, as well as free courses and Sunday worship services. Scientology officials took out newspaper ads and began to make regular appearances on local cable and radio talk shows, presenting the typical Scientologist as "the person you work with, your friend, or the person next door." By the early 1990s, the Church of Scientology's promotional materials openly boasted of Clearwater as a spiritual mecca, inviting members to come to "the largest community of Scientologists and OTs in the world." And thousands did. It was no surprise that Bennetta Slaughter would want to move her company there.

  It was also not surprising that David Miscavige would have looked to Clearwater for inspiration when plotting the next phase of Scientology's advancement. Fresh from his victory over the IRS, Miscavige had taken on a new, and in some ways even more ambitious, scheme: modernizing L. Ron Hubbard's teachings, specifically those pertaining to auditor training, a project he called the Golden Age of Tech, or GAT.

  This was a venture the Founder, having recognized that not all auditing was performed with the same lev
el of care or efficiency, had initiated in the late 1970s, said the Scientologist Dan Koon, who helped design part of the Golden Age of Tech. But Miscavige, said Koon and others, seized upon the idea in the 1990s as, among other things, a money-making scheme: GAT would enforce new, rote methods that every auditor, no matter how experienced, would have to learn at his or her own expense, and then follow exactly. Ultimately, everyone in Scientology would be initiated into Miscavige's GAT approach, a massive retraining project that, over the coming years, would make millions of dollars for the church while overhauling Scientology's auditing procedures. Flag, already the church's cash cow, would be the testing ground for this new system.

  Bennetta Slaughter wasted no time in Clearwater. Within a few months of her arrival, she'd ingratiated herself with the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce and begun to network with local politicians. "We called her the Queen of Clearwater," said Sandra Mercer, who'd moved to Florida from Los Angeles in 1990. "She put herself on all the political communication lines, on all the business communication lines ... on every communication line that she needed to get on. Had she not done that," Mercer added, "I don't know that the church would have done that well in Clearwater."

  David Miscavige knew Bennetta Slaughter as a prominent donor who attended yearly Scientology events in England and on the church's exclusive cruise ship, Freewinds. Now the leader of Scientology began to hear that she was making inroads into Clearwater society. Miscavige became concerned. For all its efforts, the official Church of Scientology had very little relationship with the mayor's office or the city commission, and it had an openly antagonistic relationship with the police. Miscavige ordered Tom De Vocht, a senior official at Flag, to find out what Slaughter was doing. "Make sure that she's forwarding our purposes," he said.

  "So I got her in to find out what she was doing, and to explain what we wanted her to be doing," said De Vocht, who now lives not far from Clearwater, in Tarpon Springs. "She was an important public figure and we wanted her to be an ambassador, to introduce us to people." Slaughter, said De Vocht, agreed to act as an emissary.

  Largely spurred by Slaughter's efforts, Scientologists became increasingly civic-minded: stringing the downtown streets with Christmas lights, funding blood drives, painting murals, organizing local cleanup projects. A group Slaughter founded, the Tampa Bay Organization of Women, sponsored a carnival, dubbed Winter Wonderland, to benefit poor children, and for a few weeks each December transformed a local park into an Alpine village, complete with artificial snow, a fifty-foot Christmas tree, and Santa Claus.

  This softened some of the skeptics in town. Sandra Mercer described their reaction: "'Oh, they celebrate Christmas? We didn't know that—they're just like us!' Of course we didn't really celebrate Christmas, but that was part of the overall 'safe pointing' strategy."

  "Safe pointing" is a specific Scientology policy about how to create allies. L. Ron Hubbard frequently urged his followers to present themselves as "stable, reliable, expert [and] productive," which would then allow them to disseminate Scientology more effectively. Slaughter prosecuted this strategy with gusto.

  Lisa McPherson was a vastly different sort of person. "She was just a sweetheart," Mercer recalled with affection. She'd met Lisa for the first time at a Scientology event in early 1994. "She was not at all the intense person that Bennetta was." But Lisa was the top producer at AMC, after Slaughter herself. It was Lisa's steady productivity that allowed Slaughter to busy herself in town. "In Scientology, Lisa was what we'd call a 'working installation,'" Mercer explained. "She was a workhorse. And Bennetta worked her and used her."

  For ten years since she'd become a Scientologist, Lisa McPherson's goal had been to go Clear. But a variety of obstacles, including her previous lack of financial resources, always stood in the way. Now, with a newly tax exempt church encouraging members to "move up the Bridge even faster" by claiming their Scientology courses and auditing as tax-exempt donations, Lisa began climbing the Bridge in earnest. In 1993, she earned more than $136,000 at AMC and donated $57,000 to the church, claiming a $17,000 refund on her taxes for "charitable deductions"—more than four times the average for taxpayers in her income bracket, the St. Petersburg Times would later note. Lisa also received a bill of $75,000 for auditing fees.* Though the money she spent on Scientology still claimed most of her earnings, Lisa never spoke of it as a financial sacrifice.

  Scientology sells itself as a self-betterment program—a route to eternal happiness. But its processes target a member's weaknesses. And, as Mercer explained, there is always a weakness that can be exploited. "You might think you've solved your big problem, but wait—your boyfriend broke up with you, or your boss is giving you a hard time, or something else. There is always something that is ruining your life and needs fixing." It is this cycle of problem–realization–cure–new problem that ultimately melds a person with Scientology's collective mindset. "It's an ongoing process," Mercer said. "After a while, your self-esteem is so low, you think everything is a problem."

  For Lisa, the problem was often men. She had suffered a string of failed romances, and in the spring of 1995 had broken up with a man named Kurt Paine, whom she'd once planned to marry. Between her sadness and work pressures, she began to appear "downstat." Her sales plummeted, and her commissions, once averaging between $4,000 and $6,000 every two weeks, now sank to just $600 or $700. With her statistics in the tank, Lisa was given an ethics handling at work and was also being audited at church. She told her auditor that it was "bullshit" and also resented the increasing pressure to put in more volunteer hours on projects like Winter Wonderland. Tensions with Bennetta Slaughter began to boil over. In his notes, her auditor wrote that Lisa was "fixated on Bennetta."

  "Bennetta was totally focused on getting Lisa to do what she wanted, all the time," said Michael Pattinson, a Scientologist who was working in Clearwater that spring, overseeing the design of the Slaughters' new house. "She was the boss, the money-maker, the FSM, and now she was the ethics officer as well—she had a vested interest in getting Lisa to make more money for the company and for Scientology, and for her." At one point, Pattinson recalled, "she said, 'I'd much rather go back to Dallas and just pursue my own life and my own career, and just be myself.' So I said, 'Listen: you should follow your own purposes in life and not someone else's purposes.'"

  But Lisa had lost track of her own purposes. In her auditing sessions, she complained that she was unable to "find" herself. She was despondent, racked with guilt, and confused—Scientology, in which Lisa had so fervently believed, had stopped working. "God damn it I feel so desperate," she told her auditor. "[I] don't want to do this anymore."

  As the former Scientology official Jesse Prince, who examined Lisa's auditing records in 1998, points out, telling your auditor you don't want auditing or that it is not working is a crime in Scientology. Once a person makes these assertions, the director of processing, who manages all auditing for the church, "retrieves" the person from his or her usual auditor and places the person in an "auditing repair program." This program, says Prince, "is designed to repair past auditing mistakes. Lisa McPherson had several of these programs, yet they did not work."

  Instead, the new program drove Lisa deeper into despair. Over and over, she spoke of leaving Scientology—"blowing," in the group's parlance; she also told her auditor that she'd been contemplating suicide. Scientologists believe very strongly that a person is fully responsible for their own condition in life, good or bad. Lisa repeatedly searched for reasons she had failed to get better. She saw herself as a "potential trouble source" to Bennetta, unhappy at work, wanting to leave. But she felt incapable of walking away. Her anger turned to despondency and finally to helplessness. "Nothing matters anymore," she told her auditor. "I just want to be left alone."

  Depressed and exhausted, Lisa took a leave of absence from AMC and in late June 1995 checked into the Fort Harrison to begin an intensive auditing program known as the Introspection Rundown, which Hubbard designed to hel
p members who were having emotional difficulties. If done correctly, the person should ultimately readjust his or her mentality and "extrovert," or focus attention less on the self and more on others, and the goals of the larger group. "The rundown is very simple and its results are magical in effectiveness," Hubbard had maintained.

  At the hotel, Lisa was assigned a roommate named Susan Schnurrenberger, a Sea Org member who worked in the base's medical office. Schnurrenberger, who had a nursing background, was charged with watching over Lisa to make sure she ate, slept, and was "sessionable"—able to receive auditing. Schnurrenberger was also supposed to prevent Lisa from hurting herself, as she had repeatedly threatened suicide. During the first few weeks, Lisa's moods roller-coastered from upbeat and "gleaming bright," as one staff member wrote in a memo, to dark and depressive. She felt as if she had an "enemy" inside of her. "Susan," she told Schnurrenberger one night, "I think I'm going crazy."

  Late that summer, however, she seemed to emerge from her confusion. The past few months had been a "blank," she wrote to Robin Rhyne on September 2, 1995, adding that she was finally out of the woods and feeling more hopeful. She was still at the Fort Harrison and being audited every day. "You will never believe the level of care and service I've received at Flag. I'm ready to go on tour and tell the world how anything CAN BE HANDLED!" she wrote.

  Finally, on September 7, 1995, Lisa achieved her longtime goal and went Clear. The struggle, as she later described it, had been like "a gopher being pulled through a garden hose," but she attributed her success to the support of her friends "and of course LRH." "It has been ... worth every single thing I've had to go through ... I am so full of life I am overwhelmed at the joy of it all!" she wrote. "Now, I understand!" she added, underlining the word understand five times. "WOW!"