The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  The Sci’gy Leaks messages had predicted: ‘Juliette will go off on him about narconon and that she wld be dead if it wasnt for the program and how dare he criticize it.’ And lo, it came to pass.

  You’re a Scientologist, why?

  ‘Well, thirteen years ago I had a little drug problem that was horrible and I did the Narconon programme and it’s the only drug rehab I ever did and then never looked back, never did drugs again, so I’m kind of happy about that.’

  What does Scientology do for you? Has it made you a better person?

  ‘Well, what I think about Hubbard just as a writer is he’s like just really interesting and I find his writing compelling and makes me think about things all the like courses I’ve done in Scientology’s made me able to understand communication better so that I could connect with people because as an artist first and foremost that’s like the most important thing to me is this connection with people. And also to understand each other, to resolve differences, because when I was like more of an introverted teen who couldn’t articulate my feelings to save my life, it was really an uncomfortable place to be so now just being able to be more comfortable in my own skin, eh, has allowed me to do live rock and roll shows as well so it’s good, good things. I’ve only had good things.’

  It felt like Groundhog Day. Still I had to through the motions.

  Which level of Scientology are you at, I asked?

  ‘I don’t like to speak in mysteric, you know, mysterious terms that people don’t understand so first and foremost I would just say I’m Juliette, I am an artist, I am female, those are the things I’m sure you understand. So as far as levels in Scientology I’ve done lots of courses, I’ve had the auditing which is the equivalent to what counselling might, you might know as counselling and stuff like that.’

  Some people say that it’s a sinister brainwashing cult. What would you say to that?

  ‘Some people have also said that women are really stupid and shouldn’t vote!’

  Well, the people who said that it’s a sinister brainwashing cult used to be in Scientology.

  ‘I did movies for fifteen years and I still do movies, and I’ve been sort of in the public eye, I guess, since I was twenty, so I’m kind of used to stereotypes, clichés, rumours, even my best of friends, you know who, they’re just hilarious stories, so, the point is the brainwashing thing I just think is funny because anybody who knows me that’s like really funny, I don’t know.’

  Who’s Xenu?

  ‘Who’s who?’

  Xenu.

  She did a weird kind of, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about’ look. Not terribly convincing. Hardly Oscar winning.

  ‘I don’t know. Is that, what? Off the internet?’

  The Church seeks to mock the utility of the internet and net-nanny its parishioners and Juliette’s response fitted in nicely within this picture.

  I told Juliette about the evil galactic warlord who blew up bits of aliens, having flown them to earth, next to volcanoes.

  ‘Really? I don’t…’ She burst into infectious giggles. ‘It sounds like great science fiction!’

  Has it anything to do with your religion?

  ‘I’ve never heard of it. I don’t know. Xenu? I don’t go on the internet a lot for like conspiracy theories and research so I don’t know that that theory, the aliens…’

  But you’ve never heard it?

  ‘Xenu? No! Never heard it. It sounds like a good movie.’

  But nothing to do with Scientology?

  ‘No. That’s the thing, the reason, you have to know why I came here today, is because I have a little rock and roll band and we tour the world and I have to do phone interviews and in-person interviews for hours and hours and hours, and a lot of times like I’ll go to Denmark, Sweden, Germany, UK and I get asked about Scientology, and a lot of the times the journalists will have really funny questions, they’re funny, depending on what mood I’m in, other times they’re annoying or aggravating.’

  Funny ha-ha? Or funny peculiar?

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ she laughed again, ‘either one depending on the mood I’m in. But no, my point is to come here is to do, give, do whatever I can to clear the air and I can only talk from personal experience and I, just as a purely selfish reason, would love to not be asked some of the very peculiar rumour questions that I’m asked a lot about Scientology. I’m also asked really funny questions about Hollywood because people have a lot of stereotypes about being an actress, you know, that I own a Rolls Royce or I have a team of stylists. I do yoga, and so I do do some alternative medicine just not the stereotype and this is from you know, all these little funny magazines, on being a Hollywood actress. So I’m used to sort of rumour and stereotype. But the Xenu and the brainwashing and the thing and aliens and blah-de-blah, this is the stellar imagination of people which I think is really creative.’

  Nothing whatsoever to do with reality of the Church of Scientology as you’ve experienced it?

  ‘As I have experienced… That is there are tall tales dreamed up by bored people, maybe people who are on the internet a lot, who do lots of blogging, maybe they don’t do blogging, maybe they just read conspiracy theories.’

  Other than your mum and dad, is LRH the greatest influence in your life?

  ‘I’m sort of influenced, like a lot of artists, we’re very kind of led by our imaginations and creativity and daydreams and stuff like that so right now I’m sort of this single minded rock and roll singer so my biggest influence right now is rock music. Next week it might be something else, but I have to sing Neil Young…’

  Good answer.

  ‘Naw, I’m just kidding. But to answer your question. Influence? Influence about things that I find strengthen and seriously L Ron Hubbard… I do hate when things are said, they’re so negative and so wrong, they’re so far-fetched off somebody that that I find extremely compassionate, intelligent and helpful to me, yeah. So it really, you know you get like that, you want to stick up for somebody that’s, you think, is a decent person, humanitarian.’

  When you do the Narconon thing, in the sauna, you drank the corn oil or whatever it was?

  ‘The oil at the end of the programme, not in the sauna, cos it needs sweated out, but at the end to put back in the oils you lose in, in or eh go into your, to replace, give your body good fat eh and get out… Out with the old, in with the new.’

  It worked for you?

  ‘Yeah, not only did it work, it’s friggin’ genius, can I say genius?’

  Yeah.

  They gave me some more Scientologists to interview, and I asked them my usual questions, but I had no idea who they were, and they all stayed on script, and none were as lucid as Juliette.

  Reflecting on my four encounters with Anne Archer, Leah Rimini, Kirstie Alley and Juliette Lewis while writing this book, I set what they had to say against the tests for brainwashing set out in Lifton’s book. This is a wholly subjective exercise. Lifton’s first test, milieu control, was passed with flying colours. They either did not use the internet at all or kept well away of anti-Scientology sites; they only referred to critics of Scientology in wholly negative terms. Normal, everyday sources of information for the rest of us – journalism, newspapers, TV – were also derided.

  On mystical manipulation: Leah, Kirstie and Juliette all denied the existence of Xenu who has, by the way, 2,240,000 hits on Google. I did not ask Anne about the space alien Satan. The women spoke reverently of the ‘technology’ or the assistance offered by the Church, but critics say the E-meter and the auditing process is a form of brainwashing. Lifton’s third test, the demand for purity, requiring the elimination of ‘taints’ and ‘poisons’ was evidenced in their reactions to critics in general and me in particular: uniformly negative. The fourth test, the cult of confession, is virtually impossible to score if the adherents are still inside the cult. One can only apply it to people who have left. The fifth test, the sacred science, is similar to the second, mystical manipulation: again, the
results would be positive. The sixth test, loading the language, generates an interesting observation: none of the women got very far with me into the brain-hurting maze of linguistic spaghetti which ex-Scientologists like Donna Shannon, Mike Henderson and Bruce Hines say they routinely used when inside the Sea Org. On the contrary, they blocked me. Likewise Tom Cruise and John Travolta, on the very rare occasions when they are asked probing questions about Scientology, block, and talk in general terms about technology and improved communication skills. The sixth, seventh and eighth tests seem impossible to score, even subjectively, if the adherents are still inside the cult, if cult it be.

  Rick Ross’s simpler three definers of a cult are, first, does the group have an absolute totalitarian leader who has no meaningful accountability? Second, does the group have a process that can be seen as brainwashing: control of information, a manipulation of people in such a way as to gain undue influence over them psychologically and emotionally? Third, does the group do harm? You decide.

  That evening we drove to Santa Barbara to meet another defector, one who was happy to talk to us, but not willing to be filmed. I zig-zagged from side to side of the freeways, watching for cars tailing us. I remember driving off the highway into a long, empty car park overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and parking, waiting, watching, to double check that we were not being followed. Had the BBC given us a sea-going car, I would have driven off into the Pacific all the way to Hawaii, to test if we were being followed, but unfortunately the bean-counters vetoed it.

  But, according to Sci’gy-Leaks, they were on our tail although not sure who we were going to see. The Communicator was told by Mike: ‘Dear Sir. SG is confirmed in the Bay area not STB [Santa Barbara] ml Mike.’

  Who is the mysterious SG? We have no idea. The only SG that pops up on the pro-Church ‘Religious Freedom Watch’ website is Scott Goehring, the founder of an internet newsgroup called ‘alt.religion.scientology’ (often abbreviated a.r.s or ARS) which the Church strongly dislikes because it encourages Scientologists to defect. However, we had no plans to talk to any SG.

  The Sci’gy-Leaks message traffic takes up the story. On Friday morning the Communicator asks: ‘Who were they seeing at STB then?’ Mike replies: ‘Dear sir Jeff Hawkins.’

  Dead right. So they followed us successfully all the way to Santa Barbara and smoked out our source, without us ever realising that we were being tailed. This was an impressive achievement. One ex-member of the Church explained to me: ‘The most likely ways are: 1. There was a plant who talked to Jeff or someone who talked to Jeff and he mentioned it or 2. His phone records were gotten and it became known he was in touch with you and the deduction went from there. There is a data base, both hard copy and computerized on Suppressive Persons and reporters at OSA Int. It is maintained in the Investigations (Intelligence) Bureau (division).’

  So perhaps all the agents did was track us on the freeway heading to Santa Barbara, make a phonecall to check on SPs in the Santa Barbara area and come up with Jeff’s name. If we did succeed in losing them, all they had to do was to discreetly tail Jeff from his home – and he would have led them to us. But it is equally possible that we never succeeded in shaking them.

  Jeff Hawkins joined the Church in 1967 and left 38 years later, taking my tally in 2007 of people who had been inside Scientology past a century: 108 years, combined, to be exact. Jeff is a brilliant graphic designer who was responsible for the volcano logo on Scientology books and TV ad campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. He had only recently left the Church and he was not yet ready to go on TV, but the picture he described of life inside was somewhat different from what I had just heard from Juliette Lewis and all. He is a compact, quietly spoken, seemingly diffident man. He said he had been beaten by David Miscavige.

  Once? I asked.

  ‘Five times,’ he said. ‘The first time was in February, 2002. I was doing writing in the Marketing area. I was called to a meeting with Miscavige to go over a script. There were 30 or 40 people there, all of the top execs of Scientology. He proceeded to disparage the script completely and denigrate me. He was talking about me in the third person, as if I wasn’t there. At one point he started saying “Look how he looks at me!” He was pointing to my face and getting himself worked up into a fury. Then all of a sudden he pumped up on the table and launched himself at me, beating me about the head and knocking me down on the ground, scratching my face and tearing my shirt. I was then sent to do “deck” work, physical labour, for two months.

  ‘In 2003, while we were taking a break from a meeting with him, he was talking to me and suddenly began slapping me, hard, on the side of my head. He hit me with the flat of his hand, very hard, about eight times. Then he went over and began to hit Marc Yager, [another senior Sea Org member] knocking him to the ground.

  ‘Once in 2004, he was giving a group of executives a tour of the RTC [Religious Technology Centre] Building at Gold, and after he had finished showing us one room, he was walking past me out the door when he suddenly punched me in the stomach, hard enough to take my breath away.

  ‘He once hit me repeatedly in the face at a meeting, enough to scratch my face and draw blood. He signalled to his Communicator, Lou Stuckenbrock [the same Lou of the Sci’gy-Leaks messages which the Church deny], who produced a small bottle of disinfectant and dabbed it on my face.

  ‘He hit me another time at a meeting.

  ‘I also saw him physically abuse others. At a meeting in the RTC Building, he knocked one executive off his chair and to the ground. At another meeting he beat Lyman Spurlock about the head. As mentioned above, I saw him beat Marc Yager to the ground. This is not to mention the verbal abuse, profanity, and threats, which were constant. He twice ordered me “over-boarded.” I was thrown in the swimming pool at the “Star of California” – at Gold Base, in the Californian desert, once, fully clothed. This is about the only use the pool gets any more.

  ‘Another time, just before I was offloaded [quit the Church] in 2005, I was thrown in the freezing lake, at night, in February. My age at the time, 58.

  ‘I was beaten by others as well, numerous times by one of Miscavige’s “pets,” on his orders. I was once hit by a woman executive, and she demanded of my fellow staff “why didn’t one of you hit him?”’

  The Church of Scientology and David Miscavige deny all allegations that he is physically violent in any way.

  The Church’s Freedom Magazine says of Jeff that he is a ‘liar to the core’ running with an ‘honest to goodness terrorist organization’ – the usual, in other words.

  Some time after we met him, Jeff published an e-book about his experiences in the Church, Counterfeit Dreams. In it, he describes the moment he did OT III: ‘I sat with trembling hands… an evil galactic overlord named Xenu… they were then dumped into volcanoes, the volcanoes were exploded with H-bombs, and the Thetans then went through days of brainwashing with pictures of angels and devils…’

  Back in 2007, Jeff went on to explain that there was a RPF dungeon of the mind hidden inside the Scientology ‘Concrete Angel’ complex which we had been given a tour of that very day. He drew us a picture of 20 or so Sea Org prisoners, cooped up in a small airless room, paying for their crimes against the Church in a part of the complex he called Lebanon Hall. The prisoners were in bunks. Outside was a guard and a security camera. Jeff also drew us a map showing the location of the dormitory - on the first floor as you enter the building, but accessible through a door from the ground floor if you went round the back. Third, he drew Miscavige beating an executive up, throwing a chair and the man to the ground. The victim? Mike Rinder. That was something to ask Mike, next time I met him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘You Suck Cock on Hollywood Boulevard’

  The Church does not own the skies above their once secret base at Gilman Hot Springs, also known as Gold, on the edge of the Californian desert, at least, not yet. We lifted off, the Hollywood sign somewhere below us, then clattered across the thickly populated chessbo
ard of LA. The cheapest way of experiencing something like the sensation of flying in a helicopter is snorkelling. Floating around on top of the sea, you see the ridges and troughs of the sea bottom rise and fall away from you. It is weirdly like that in a chopper, the land beneath you rising and dipping, the Perspex bubble of the helicopter canopy just a posher version of your snorkel mask.

  We were heading east, rising and falling over a fag-end of a dirty brown, dry-as-dust mountain chain till we got to what used to be called Gilman Hot Springs, near Hemet, about 90 miles east of LA. Mr Hubbard arrived here in 1979, pretty much on the run from the FBI. One Scientologist, Anne Rosenblum, who was only familiar with the great man through his approved photographs from the sixties was shocked to discover that he had ‘rotting teeth and a really fat gut’. Worse, she had been told the pet dogs of Mrs Mary Sue Hubbard were ‘Clear’, and would only bark at people who had committed ‘overts’ – crimes – against the Hubbards. When they started snapping at her, ‘I started walking around wondering what deep, dark terrible overts I had committed on LRH or Mary Sue in this life or past lives.’ The possibility that the pooches were just reacting to Anne, a stranger, in an ordinary, doggy way eluded her mind-set back then.

  The 1977 FBI raids on the Church’s offices which had unearthed the documents proving that not journalist Paulette Cooper but the Church had been sending itself bomb threats caught bigger fish in the net. The raids had revealed Operation Snow White, a vast attempt by the Church to seize compromising documents from the US government. More than 130 government agencies were targeted for thefts or infiltration, involving perhaps as many as 5,000 covert agents. At the fag-end of 1979, nine Scientologists, including L Ron’s wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, pleaded guilty to specimen charges of subverting the United States government, and she was sentenced to five years. The Church hid Hubbard away at Gilman Hot Springs, an old resort gone to seed, for a while, then moved him on, further into the desert, living a life of total seclusion from the outside world. Paranoid, gibbering, uneasy at the real possibility of arrest, trial and prison, L Ron lived out his last years cocooned from reality by his devoted ‘Messengers’, hand-picked children of the Sea Org staff, one of them, David Miscavige.