Inside Scientology (50 page)

But the RPF refused to let him go. Another year passed. Stefan remained imprisoned. Every day his auditor worked on him: why was he still so in love with his wife? "It was like this Machiavellian thing had been unleashed against me—I didn't know who was doing this to me, or why," he said. "All I knew was that somebody really wanted to make sure that I got divorced."

More months went by. His auditor told him that Tanja had signed divorce papers. Stefan began to understand that he would never leave the RPF unless he agreed to let go of Tanja completely. "And so I let go," he admitted to me.

Accordingly, he forced himself to stop talking about Tanja. He told himself to stop thinking about her. He agreed not to write or in any other way try to communicate with Tanja. He pledged himself to serve the Church of Scientology in whatever way it asked. Finally, in June 2003, Stefan "graduated" from the RPF, a broken man. He emerged from the Cedars of Lebanon building as cleansed as Winston Smith, in the book
1984.
"I felt just like him," he said. "Everything's great, the organization is great, the propaganda is great, the technology is great, it's all wonderful. I'm divorced."

Less than twenty-four hours after Stefan got off the RPF, Tanja's mother, who worked at the PAC Base, approached him and gave him a cell phone. Soon Stefan received a call. "I still love you," Tanja whispered into the phone. She'd never signed divorce papers. They were still married.

For all the years that they had been separated, and in spite of all the pressure she'd endured, Tanja had never let go of Stefan. By the summer of 2003, she'd even begun wearing her wedding ring again. "It was my little statement," she said. "I didn't care what anyone said; the only thing that mattered was what was between him and me."

To understand just how dramatic this quiet act of defiance was, consider that during her thirteen years of working for Miscavige, Tanja had never voiced an opinion about anything that happened on the base, from her husband's banishment to Miscavige's increasingly brutal behavior, let alone express opposition to any of them.

Certain officials and inner-circle members like Tanja report that in addition to routine tongue-lashings, Miscavige from time to time physically attacked executives who angered him.
^*
One frequent target was Mike Rinder, his unflappable Australian deputy and the head of the OSA, whose job was to manage lawsuits and do damage control. One time, Miscavige, furious over the negative press coverage of the Lisa McPherson case, called the OSA chief to his villa; then, grabbing Rinder around the neck, he swung him into a small tree. "[Then he] started kicking him," said Marty Rathbun, who'd been called to "witness" the attack.

On other occasions, the leader of Scientology is said to have publicly slapped, kicked, punched, or shoved executives who angered him, including Jeff Hawkins, who said he was attacked by Miscavige on five separate occasions, beginning in 2002. "It wasn't like he did it everywhere—it was usually in meetings or when he was inspecting an area," said Hawkins. Only those present saw what went on, "and they did not talk about it to other staff." The lowest-ranking workers on the base, for the most part, were exempt from the leader's abuse. The rest took what came to them silently. No one reported these beatings to the police.

"After twenty-eight years in Scientology, you blamed yourself for what was happening.
I
must be a real scumbag to pull that in," explained Tom De Vocht, who said he was attacked several times by Miscavige. He never fought back, nor did he expect anyone else to put up a challenge. "You're talking about the pope of Scientology beating on his staff, the man who controls your eternal salvation," he said. Besides, De Vocht added, many people, including him, had been conditioned to act exactly as Miscavige did.

Indeed, this toxic environment metastasized to such a degree that Miscavige's underlings, unprovoked by the leader, would similarly descend upon one another, ganging up on whoever seemed weakest. Group confessions, referred to as "séances," had become regular occurrences at Int. At these events, executives who'd angered Miscavige in some way were made to sit at the front of a large room, such as the base dining hall, and one by one stand up and confess their "crimes." De Vocht witnessed numerous séances, including those where Miscavige himself would stand up and reveal someone's crimes, having combed through their auditing folders. "In front of seven hundred people, he'd say, 'It came up today that so-and-so was jerking off,' or 'Sam, here, in another life molested a child.' Well, people had very little sleep, they were eating rice and beans, they were half psychotic from working such long hours, and they'd go into a frenzy." Often the attacks were made in defense of the chairman of the board himself.
"What have you done to Dave?!"
the people would shout, and they'd jeer while the accused racked his brain to think of an appropriate response.
^*

Somehow, Tanja told herself, all of this must be for the greatest good. But doubt had begun to eat away at her. "Please try to get back here—you have to," she told Stefan one night on the phone. "I don't think I can handle it here alone."

But Stefan remained in Los Angeles, no closer to leaving the PAC Base than when he'd arrived four years earlier. Miscavige had refused to sign his release papers. The leader now decreed that those recently finished with the RPF were not to be seen as "rehabilitated" until they'd made up for the damage they'd caused the organization. How they were to do this was never explained. Meanwhile, Miscavige had grown suspicious of his secretary. One day in Los Angeles, the leader confronted Tanja. "Tell me the truth," he said. "Have you spoken to that scumbag husband of yours?"

Mustering all of her courage, Tanja admitted it: yes, she had. It was the last conversation she and Miscavige would have.
^†

The following day, August 14, 2004, Tanja was sent back to the Int Base, where she was ordered to the Old Gilman House, a ramshackle, two-story building on the far edge of the property, which was used as a detention center for staff who'd expressed disaffection with the current management or a desire to "blow." There she would begin a program of "correction," a less structured, and more isolated, version of the RPF. She picked vegetables, lived in a trailer off the main house, and ate her meals, delivered by a security guard, alone. She was audited daily. None of her friends or former colleagues in Miscavige's office were allowed to have anything to do with her; indeed, her name would never be uttered among the regular staff at Int, as if she had literally been wiped from the collective memory there. From her once-lofty position as the favored communicator of the chairman of the board, Tanja had fallen to the level of, as she put it, "scum."

Three months passed before Tanja was summoned to a private room to meet with the Sea Org executives Warren McShane and Mike Rinder. Stefan had left the Sea Org, they told her. He'd walked off the PAC Base in broad daylight a few weeks earlier, slipping past his minder during a shift change. Then, they said, he'd sought legal advice from Ford Greene, a well-known attorney of the San Francisco Bay Area who'd successfully litigated against Scientology in the Larry Wollersheim case. That Stefan had contacted this sworn enemy made him unredeemable in the eyes of the church.

Tanja will never forget how coolly Rinder delivered the news about Stefan's defection. He had her divorce papers folded under an envelope on the table in front of him. There was one set of documents left to finalize her split with Stefan. "He thought for sure I was going to sign the papers and end it right there," she said. Instead, Tanja stood her ground. "Well, if he left, then I guess I'm going to leave too," she announced to the men. Rinder, she added, was "furious."

For the next week or so, Tanja endured "intense pressure" to change her mind. Rinder in particular couldn't fathom Tanja's stubbornness: her husband had committed some of the worst sins imaginable, and she
wanted
to be with him? She aimed to leave behind her family, her group, her religion, everything? According to Scientology's teachings, Stefan Castle was just one husband in a long string of husbands Tanja had already had, and would have, as a spiritual being over many lifetimes. "What is the big deal?" Rinder said.

Tanja was then subjected to another ten days of constant auditing. Then once again she met with Rinder, for what was called an "ethics interview." This time, he informed her, she wouldn't be allowed to leave the room until she confessed. When she insisted that she'd already told him everything, Rinder began to berate her. "He was just wide-eyed and red in the face, spitting and spraying me with his fury ... He painted this whole picture of what it would be like if I went out and found Stefan." Rinder, she said, gave the couple six months. "He kept saying, 'You have no money, no experience. You won't be able to talk to your family,' and he kind of played on my uncertainty. How could I know what I would be walking into if I were to leave?" Tanja had never had a credit card, didn't drive a car, didn't have a bank account. How could she possibly survive?

For years, Tanja had thought that one day she might be interrogated, and wondered how she would hold up. She'd assumed that she would be strong and make it through. But as Rinder's harangue continued, she felt herself weakening. She found it unbearable that Stefan, wholly unaware of her punishment and possibly believing she'd soon follow, had defected. Now he'd lost his spiritual salvation—his eternity. Even if he begged, he would never be able to return to the church. "These were things I couldn't bear the thought of," she said. After a while, "I was just dead. I wasn't crying, I wasn't showing any emotion, I was feeling kind of numb."

After more than twelve hours of interrogation, Tanja was given a piece of paper and a pen and told to write a "disconnection" letter to Stefan. She read the letter aloud while Rinder recorded the event with a video camera. Then Tanja was presented with divorce papers one last time. Through tears, she signed her name.

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into the conference room on the International Base one afternoon in the late fall of 2004, looking as if he was going to explode. "You guys are all shitheads," he barked. The leader ran through his usual litany of complaints: the overall organizational board was a mess; no one was doing their job; he was working himself to death just to counter the laziness and incompetence of those around him. All of the senior executives were SPs who might as well spend the rest of their lives cleaning septic tanks and breaking rocks. In fact, he might just make sure that some of them did that.

Suddenly, he asked, "Who knows what 'musical chairs' means?"

Several people raised their hand and stammered out Scientology's particular definition: "A constant transfer of workers from one job to another."

"No, fuck you," Miscavige said. "What else?"

"It's a game," someone finally said.

Miscavige, it turned out, had called them all to this meeting to play musical chairs, albeit with a twist. He explained that when the music stopped, whoever didn't get a chair would be offloaded from the base.

The officials went silent.

"You guys have fucked with me for the last time," Miscavige said.

The leader ordered that a large boom box be brought into the conference room, and when it arrived, he popped in a CD of Queen's
Greatest Hits.
Freddie Mercury's operatic tenor led off with "Bohemian Rhapsody": "
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?"
Slowly, people began walking around the circle of chairs. Marc Headley, now an executive, couldn't believe he was doing this. He took a quick survey of the players: among the nearly seventy officials were Miscavige's onetime deputy Greg Wilhere, and another top lieutenant, Mark Ingber; there was the OSA chief, Mike Rinder, and also Marty Rathbun and the CMO executive Tom De Vocht. The music stopped. An old-time member of the Sea Org who probably hadn't left the base in twenty years lost his chair. Then the game continued and a second person was gone.

What did Miscavige really mean by "offload"? Headley, who was eliminated after a few rounds, decided it could mean a number of things: Some people, the lucky ones, might be moved to another organization; those whom Miscavige considered more serious offenders might be sentenced to a remote Rehabilitation Project Force in, say, New Zealand. Others might be handed a few hundred dollars, put on a bus, and kicked out altogether. Most of the people on the base had no family outside Scientology. Where would they go? What would they do? Few had credit cards or bank accounts; even fewer owned vehicles. The base was all they knew.

Headley watched as friends who'd worked together for years battled it out for a chair. By the time the number had dwindled to twenty, people were throwing one another against the walls, ripping seats from one another's hands, wrestling one another to the floor.

Finally, just four players remained. Miscavige changed the music to Mozart's Requiem Mass. Greg Wilhere grabbed Mark Ingber and threw him aside—one down. Lisa Schroer, one of Marc Headley's colleagues, bested Wilhere in racing for a seat—now he was gone too. It was between Schroer and Wilhere's wife, Sue. The women walked around a single chair for what struck Headley as an eternity. The music stopped. Schroer won. The game was over.

"Do any of you animals have anything to say?" Miscavige asked. No one did. It was 3
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The leader confined all seventy people to the conference room and ordered them to sleep under the tables. Food was delivered from time to time. A few days later, they were told that Miscavige had decided not to offload anyone after all.