Inside Scientology (51 page)

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For Marty Rathbun, who'd spent the game of musical chairs quietly looking out the window "trying to distract myself," as he said, Miscavige's threats were nothing new. After twenty years as the leader's deputy, Rathbun, like Tom De Vocht and several other senior officials of the Church of Scientology, had grown almost used to DM's bizarre behavior. Virtually every meeting with Miscavige involved an element of fear: the initial summons required that those called to it drop whatever they were doing and sprint to the assignation place; there they would wait until the leader, who'd often be playing Nintendo in his private lounge, decided to show up.

He would arrive flanked by his wife and Lou Stuckenbrock, a retinue of aides, and, often, his beagles. He had five dogs, two of which, Jelly and Safi, wore tiny blue sweaters with commander's bars. Miscavige was known to make his staffers salute the dogs, who held ranks higher than those of many people on the base. The meeting room would have been thoroughly white-gloved and set with an ashtray, an air purifier, and an assortment of the leader's favorite snacks—Balance or Pure Protein energy bars were a notable passion, as were raspberry sour candies and Penta ultra-purified water, which Miscavige ordered by the case.

Then Miscavige would open the meeting with an accusation or, more often, a comment about someone's sexual peccadilloes, which he seemed to relish discussing at great length. If anyone else in the room was to snicker or even blink, the leader would threaten him or her with expulsion. "You'll be flipping burgers at McDonald's," he frequently said, before launching into the main thrust of his meeting, which was usually, according to Jeff Hawkins, "a dissertation about how everything was wrong and how terrible and suppressive everybody was."

The once-vast org board, which at Int had originally listed hundreds of posts, was now irrelevant. Its purpose, to ensure that a particular organization worked like a well-oiled machine to achieve the goals of Scientology, was moot at Int. Distrusting many of his associates, Miscavige had sidelined them to be punished or rehabilitated, so that important efforts were understaffed. He forced his remaining executives, an ever-dwindling number, to endlessly revise the organizational charts; because he was perpetually displeased with their strategies, the task had dragged on for four years—since 2000. He micromanaged each facet of the work done at Int, demanding that every marketing plan, event proposal, and film script be submitted to him instantly. Then he sat on the documents for days or weeks, or even months, only to reject each one, with a scathing putdown of the person who'd submitted it. In this atmosphere, little productive activity could occur.

The leader's impatience and disgust with Int Base personnel eventually escalated into a full-blown purge. During group confessions, often daylong affairs, hundreds of people were evicted from the base and sent to the RPF; dozens more waited at the former Happy Valley, now called the Int Ranch, to be offloaded, Scientology's equivalent of a dishonorable discharge.
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Virtually all of the Church of Scientology's senior managers and technical officials were denounced as SPs and locked in the large, doublewide trailer that housed the conference room where the game of musical chairs had taken place. The trailer had been designated "SP Hall," or simply "The Hole." The condemned would remain there for months—some for years—sleeping under their desks, showering in a garage, unable to get even a change of clothes unless it was to do work Miscavige had specifically ordered, such as squiring around visiting VIPs or appearing at church events (for example, the OSA chief, Mike Rinder, and Guillaume Lesevre, head of the Church of Scientology International, would be released, outfitted in tuxedos, and sent to promote Scientology to the membership, then reinstalled in The Hole upon their return).

Even the grand new RTC building Miscavige built on the base in 1999, a fifty-five-thousand-foot structure of imported sandstone, now stood empty. The only people who worked there were Miscavige and his personal staff, which by the time of the infamous musical chairs had reportedly dwindled to just half a dozen people; the rest had been demoted or declared SPs.
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Such purges had, of course, happened before. In the early 1950s Hubbard had denounced and expelled those in the Dianetics movement who opposed him; by 1959, the Founder would declare his own son an SP. But Hubbard, while a tyrant in his worst moments, also had the capacity to forgive. "Once he got over his tirades and tantrums, he'd follow it up with some justice measure"—often by granting sweeping "amnesties" to those he'd committed to the RPF, said the former Scientologist Glenn Samuels, who was purged from Scientology in 1982.

But Miscavige didn't seem to believe in absolution, nor, as many saw it, in justice. By the mid-2000s, the leader's way of denouncing staffers as Suppressive Persons had become staggeringly random. No longer was a defection, a leaked document, or some other treasonous act a prerequisite for being deemed an SP, though only serious offenses like those would seem to merit such severe condemnation. It meant, after all, expulsion from the church and the loss of salvation—a severe penalty. But now anyone who expressed even the smallest criticism of church policy or leadership was in danger of being cast out.

For people like Marty Rathbun, the promise of eternal freedom, Scientology's core doctrine, kept them hanging on during Miscavige's oppressive regime. But ultimately, even Rathbun decided he'd had enough. One afternoon in December 2004, having witnessed Miscavige physically attack Tom De Vocht during a meeting, Rathbun felt himself hit an invisible wall. If he didn't remove himself from the situation, he realized, he might kill Miscavige out of pure hate. Later that evening, Rathbun retrieved his Yamaha 650 motorcycle from the bushes where it was parked, wheeled it downhill, and waited for the back gate to open. When it did, just as a car drove through, "I gunned it and headed out down the road." That was the last he'd ever see of the base.

Within a few weeks, De Vocht was gone as well, in much the same manner. By that spring, so was Jeff Hawkins. Not one of these executives, nor those who followed, including Mike Rinder, who departed Scientology in 2007, made a move to suggest that Miscavige should be the one to leave, though both Rathbun and De Vocht later said they thought about it. "We had a tacit agreement that something needed to be done about this guy ... but you couldn't go there, because if you got caught going there, you'd be declared [an SP] forever," said Rathbun, who would never relinquish his belief in L. Ron Hubbard's technology, despite losing faith in the management of his church.

Hawkins knew that opposing Miscavige would be futile. He'd been in the Church of Scientology for thirty-eight years, had seen the movement's leadership evolve from idealistic to authoritarian to, as he saw it, Orwellian in mindset. Through it all, he'd fought to maintain his own integrity in what became a permanently hostile and intimidating environment. Finally, Hawkins accepted as pointless his hopes that things might change. What was happening at the base, said the onetime marketing chief, "was an irreversible trend. And when I realized that, I said, 'I'm out of here.'"

Throughout the Sea Org rank and file, many other members were making the same decision.

On January 10, 2005, Stefan and Tanja Castle were legally divorced. Five months later, Tanja left the trailer by the Old Gilman House that had become her home and returned to Int proper, where she was given a bed in a dormitory and a new job: helping to build sets for Golden Era Productions. The internal struggle she'd gone through for nine months, poring over LRH's teachings to see if she could find some justification for what had happened to her, was over. Stefan was an SP. Nothing else mattered. "Once the group has agreed that something is a certain way, one person can't change it on her own," she said.

It had been five years since Stefan had been separated from his wife, and less than one year since he had fled from the PAC Base, a far easier place to leave, he knew, than Int. He had tried everything he could think of to communicate with Tanja, even filing a missing person's report with the Hemet police department; nothing had worked. The detectives couldn't prove that Tanja was being held against her will. His lawyer informed him that there was no legal way to force Tanja to speak to him, unless it could be proved that she was being held captive. Desperate, Stefan contacted the church a few weeks after he fled, offering to come back to Scientology if they would let him be with Tanja. Maybe there was a place where they could go. Australia, he offered. Even the RPF, provided they could do it together.

But Scientology didn't want him back. Instead, Stefan received a call from the Office of Special Affairs, summoning him to Scientology's large Mother Church building on Hollywood Boulevard. When he arrived, Elliot Abelson, the Church of Scientology's general counsel, handed Stefan a thirty-page document stating that he would never sue or denounce the church to the press, and asked him to sign. Then Abelson wrote a check for $25,000. "This will help you get started," he said.

The money petrified Stefan. Scientology often made cash settlements with its defectors, particularly those the church worried might speak to the press or testify against it in court. Several of these former officials, after reportedly receiving payments, had in fact retracted the negative statements they'd previously made. But no one, to Stefan's knowledge, had ever been offered as much as $25,000 to simply keep quiet, unless the person posed a particular threat.

What the fuck is going on?
he wondered. Then he realized what it was: his wife had been Miscavige's secretary.
What does she know?
Stefan didn't have a clue. Tanja had never shared RTC secrets with him.

But clearly the church feared that she had. Stefan tried to bargain with Abelson: what if he and Tanja stayed in the movement and simply minded their own business? Abelson said it was too late. "Take it." He pushed the check toward Stefan. "We'd like to rest at ease that you aren't going to talk to anyone."

"I didn't think I had a choice," Stefan said. So he signed the agreement and took the check, but didn't cash it. The following day, his lawyer, Ford Greene, sent a strongly worded letter to the church, accusing its leaders of coercion and demanding that they rescind the agreement. The church, remembering the tenacity with which Greene had successfully litigated against them on behalf of Wollersheim and several other Scientologists, agreed. Then all went quiet.

Stefan tried to move on with his life. He found a job working in production design and soon started his own company. He began to read the critical material about Scientology on the Internet. He reached out to former Sea Org members he met online, many of whom, he discovered, had been hauled into OSA headquarters, confronted by lawyers, and offered sizable monetary inducements to keep their mouths shut, just as he had.

Toward the end of 2005, Stefan reconnected with Marc and Claire Headley, who'd escaped from the Int Base shortly after the musical chairs incident. Marc had gone first, in the early hours of January 5, 2005, on his motorcycle, ultimately making his way to Kansas City, Missouri, where his father, who had long ago left Scientology, now resided.

Claire followed a few weeks later, having finagled a trip into town to refill a contact lens prescription. From there, she'd called a taxi and hightailed it to the nearest bus station.

Sitting with the Headleys in the back garden of their snug, bungalow-style house in Burbank, Stefan knew he had to rescue Tanja. He'd continued to dream about her, which was reaffirming. There was still a connection. She was the only woman he'd ever loved. If she had moved on, he believed he would have sensed it.

And Tanja felt this too. "All this time I'd been wondering, 'Is Stefan surviving, is he doing okay, what's happened to him?'" she said. "There was always a side of me that was out there with him. I never stopped thinking about it."

In her former life as an obedient RTC staffer, Claire Headley had helped convince Tanja to file for divorce. Now she was plagued with guilt. "I felt like the shittiest person," she said. "I thought to myself, anything I could do to somehow make things right I had to do."

The answer came to her in a dream. She had sent Tanja a letter in a Victoria's Secret box. Lingerie items, which RTC women ordered online, were the only packages that were never opened by security staff at the base—a rule that was passed after some security guards had gotten in trouble for opening several Victoria's Secret packages. Excitedly, Claire shook Marc awake. "I know how we can free Tanja."

The following day, Stefan ordered Tanja some items from the Victoria's Secret catalog. Then he sat down and composed a letter. "I love you and know you still have love for me too," he wrote. "Regardless of everything, I have no regrets of having left the Sea Org. I am free. I have my dignity."

Stefan then tucked the letter into a pair of jeans and put a cell phone in the box as well. He taped the package securely and, for good measure, "kicked it around to make it look like it was coming from Ohio. And then I sent it by UPS." Then he waited.

A few days later, Tanja received the package. Knowing she hadn't ordered anything, she took it as a message. "It was surreal," she said. "But there was a calmness about me." She opened the package and read her husband's letter.
"Call me!"

Tanya wavered. She wanted to be with Stefan, of course. But after all she'd been through, how could she leave? She considered all the ways in which people had escaped from the base: They'd driven off in a car or motorcycle—Tanja didn't have either. They jumped the fence—exhausted from working long hours and eating rice and beans, Tanja was too weak. Simply walking down the highway would be easiest, but that hardly ever worked: only three people she'd ever heard about had successfully blown using that technique.

She wrote Stefan a letter telling him she didn't see how it would be possible. But she couldn't stop thinking about her husband. "I knew once I had sent the letter I had crossed a line," she said. One night, summoning every ounce of her courage, she called him.