The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (11 page)

‘It was a bit like the scene from
The Untouchables
where Al Capone walked around with a baseball bat. But without the bat.

‘Later when Miscavige finally started talking, what he spoke about had nothing to do with Yager or me. I realized then that Miscavige, by suddenly starting to include me in his beatings, was actually grooving me in or grooming me up for the same treatment. It was obvious that I was the actual person he wanted to hit since he made the announcement, then hit someone else.

‘A few weeks later, I think it was November, 2003, Mike Rinder and I were working on another script. Miscavige ordered something to be fixed. Although my IQ is over 150, I never could understand the guy or what he wanted because he had the knack of both telling you to do and not do something in the same meeting. Plus he would also say to do other things, making comprehending  what he wanted nearly impossible.’

Remember, poor Naz, Tom Cruise’s date who says she got dumped because she could not understand Miscavige’s speed-talk? She was, it seems, not alone.

‘So Miscavige ordered Mike Rinder to help me. Mike had known Miscavige longer and was able to decipher his gobbledy-gook orders a bit better perhaps. As per usual his orders were indecipherable. However, Mike thought he knew what to do. We made a minor fix of honestly just a few words. Miscavige came down to review the edit. For some peculiar reason, Miscavige ordered Mike and I to stand shoulder to shoulder while Miscavige stood just in front of us. Miscavige actually pressed us together so our shoulders were touching. Miscavige barked out orders to start the video then said “STOP!” He wheeled around and glared at me. As per usual I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was angry about. No one else knew either. His eyes held on me, then shifted to Mike for ten seconds. These stare-down sessions were part of how Miscavige rolls. He just stares at you and says nothing. Meanwhile, your mind is racing. Then he went back to staring at me. No-one in the room was even breathing. He looked back at Mike and suddenly launched at him. He was only about 12 inches away so he was at him lightning quick.

‘Miscavige grabbed Mike’s head with both hands and shoved him backwards so Mike lost his balance. Miscavige put his whole body into it, shoving from the legs up, and bashed Mike’s head into the wall three times, solid cherry cabinets built into the wall. Miscavige’s arms and whole body were shaking with the force and rage, as if he was trying to crush Mike’s head, and Mike’s head hit the wall HARD three times. Mike did not retaliate.

‘After that, Miscavige left. Yager asked Mike, “What was that for?” and Mike who still seemed somewhat dazed said, “I guess he didn’t like the edit.”’

The Church, David Miscavige and Marc Yager deny the violence allegations against David Miscavige.

The Church’s Freedom magazine suggests that Steve Hall was a fantasist, by claiming that in past lives he was variously Jesus, Buddha and the co-creator of the Universe. The Church mocks Steve’s claim to be a ‘scriptwriter’ for the ecclesiastic leader of the religion, Mr Miscavige, saying the claim is ‘patently false’: ‘By that definition, a person peeling potatoes in the army is “The President’s Potato Peeler.”’

I am looking forward to meeting Steve Hall and sharing a potato with him.

Amy Scobee was in for 27 years and rose to head the Celebrity Centre in LA, where she got to know Cruise, Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Anne Archer – Tommy’s mum – Nancy Cartwright, Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, Juliette Lewis, Isaac Hayes and others. She is a lovely, bubbly woman, one of those people who wake up every morning as if they had already enjoyed a glass of champagne – not literally, of course. But Amy is fun to hang out with. She got out in 2005 and five years later told me that she had witnessed Miscavige beat people up seven, maybe eight times. On one occasion, she saw her pope attack a victim: ‘He’d jumped across the table, grabbed him around the neck, knocked him unto the floor, jumped on top of him, grabbed the epaulette, pulled it off, grabbed the tag, pulled it off. Buttons flying, change falling out.’

Amy’s book,
Abuse at The Top
, is a compelling read, setting out her evidence of grotesque physical, mental, sexual abuse of innocence. Her first contact with Scientology was at the age of 14. Once she turned 16, she signed the billion-year-contract, becoming a member of the Sea Org. Within months she was on the RPF, the Rehabilitation Project Force, which is a more extreme version of the Scientology boot camp in which Donna said she witnessed Tommy Davis having his hair pulled, an allegation Tommy and the Church deny.

Amy’s crime? Having consensual sex with a man she was in love with and who she planned to marry. What kind of religion is it that places a sixteen-year-old on a punishment regime for slap and tickle? Amy spent two years on the RPF. Her account reads like torture. Inside the RPF, degradation was never far away. If you transgressed you were punished by being placed on ‘rocks and shoals’: made to run up ‘laps’ up and down stairs. A big ‘lap’ was running up and down 11 flights of stairs to the top of the Foot Harrison Hotel and back.

The cruellest feature of her experience on the RPF for her and her fellow ‘convicts’ was lack of sleep, making accidents, she says, grimly frequent. Her RPF unit was working full-time building a house for LRH at Gold, lest he ever return. In truth, Mr Hubbard was living – or rather dying – in hiding a few dozen miles away in an out-of-the-way ranch.

‘Fatigue was constant,’ wrote Amy. ‘I recall in the middle of the night pushing a wheelbarrow up the hill and the next thing I knew I woke up in a ditch.’ In her book, she writes that a fellow RPF-er cut his finger off on the table-saw; another cut open his leg with an angle grinder because he fell asleep while using it; a woman fell 20 feet off a scaffold and shattered her pelvis.

After all their efforts, the LRH was subsequently entirely demolished and rebuilt.

On Christmas Day, 1984, Amy’s RPF was ordered to ‘white-glove’ clean the base galley for the crew. It being Christmas, the RPF were allowed to listen to the radio, a perk usually forbidden.

When LRH died in January 1986, the whole Sea Org was placed in a condition of mass mourning. Amy had no proper time to grieve her uncle, the NASA astronaut, Dick Scobee, one of seven killed in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, killed two days after the announcement of LRH’s death. For a true Scientologist, the passing away of a man she had never met trumped the death of her uncle, the Commander of the space shuttle.

As she ascended in the ranks of the Church, Amy came to know Miscavige well but not to admire him. One day Miscavige brought in a new executive, dressed in a black sweater with four gold Captain stripes on her epaulettes. The executive made a whimper when she saw Amy. Miscavige told her that the executive could sniff out crimes so she must have something ‘pretty slimy’ going on. The executive, she alleges, was Miscavige’s dog, Jelly.

Violent beatings, sexual humiliation and psychotic behaviour were par for the course, she writes.

As Miscavige consolidated his grip on power, life at Gold became grim, grimmer than before. The little sweeteners of life – listening to the radio, having plants or pictures of your family in the office – came to be forbidden, she writes. Family time, an hour a day for parents to spend with their kids, was cancelled; pregnancies in the Sea Org were forbidden, meaning that anyone without children in Sea Org had to accept childlessness or the damnation that came with exit. Amy got out when she was 42, childless.

Amy reflects on her mindset, on why she allowed herself to be abused in this dreadful way: ‘Unbelievably, I never blamed anyone for being put through these things. We were so indoctrinated or brainwashed into believing that we’re not our bodies, the mission is more important than self and that anything personal could easily be sacrificed for the cause.’

After she left Amy read
Combating Cult Mind Control
by ex-Moonie Steven Hassan. One particular passage impressed Amy: ‘Members are made to feel part of an elite corps of mankind. This feeling of being special, or participating in the most important acts of human history with a vanguard of committed believers, is strong emotional glue to keep people sacrificing and working hard.’

Amy reflects on her 27 years of what you could call ‘
mind-glue
’: ‘that makes a lot of sense to me as to why I could have possibly tolerated a fraction of what I did and still stick with the organisation.’

The Church and Miscavige deny Amy’s allegations of abuse and violence. On Amy, the Church suggests that she is sexually voracious and grossly incompetent. Freedom Magazine says: ‘Today, Scobee spends her days posting salacious drivel to cyber-terrorists on the lunatic fringe of the Internet. Although she has thus far escaped hate-crime scrutiny, she remains among the nastiest snipers and her snippets are filled with sexual tittle-tattle. So, yes, while Scobee may have never been a “celebrity queen,” she at least now qualifies as a gossip maven…’

A simple test of a civilised human being is how they describe those who have treated them badly. An ancient but lovely Berliner called Wolfgang Von Leyden taught me philosophy when I was a student at LSE. He was brilliant, kind and good. He had had to run from Germany in the thirties. He described the Nazis as ‘churlish and ill-bred’.

I thought Amy was smashing.

This list of ex-Scientologists who agree with Bruce Hines that Miscavige is angry and violent is not exhaustive. But I cannot include them all. My last witness on the issue of whether Scientology’s pope abuses his adepts gave her testimony in open court in Texas in February 2012. Former Scientologist Debbie Cook told a court in San Antonio that she witnessed ‘terror and tyranny’ during the 17 years as head of the church in Florida.

Cook told the court: ‘I witnessed Mr. Miscavige physically punching the face and wrestling to the ground another executive at Scientology International’ – Gold. A colleague called Ginge Nelson, she said, objected to the violence and he was later made to lick the bathroom floor clean for half an hour. ‘One time I was called into a conference room and asked some questions and he ordered his secretary to slap me. And she slapped me so hard I fell over into the chairs. One time Mr Miscavige ordered his Communicator to break my finger if I didn’t answer his question. It was bent back very hard. It was not broken.’

Her lawyer asked: ‘Getting ordered to have someone slap you down or throw water in your face or break your finger, what were the horrible crimes that you would commit that would cause these punishments to be inflicted?’

Debbie replied: ‘Just not answer a question fast enough or maybe your expression displeased him. Maybe you were smiling or you shouldn’t have been smiling.’

‘Did you ever witness any incidents of violence or torture or degradation in England?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Debbie. ‘I was at a meeting with Mr Miscavige and with several top international executives. And then he ordered a man named Bob Keenan’ – Fireman Bob – ‘to take those other executives and throw them into the lake. At the time it was October and it was very cold in England… They were made to go into the cold lake.’

Was Debbie physically abused by Miscavige, her lawyer asked?

Once, she said, he ‘grabbed my shoulders and shook me while he was yelling at me.’

Her lawyer asked her how she ended up in The Hole, a bizarre dungeon of the mind she described at Gold.

‘In May 2007,’ – the month our Panorama aired – ‘I was at the International Base [Gold]. Mr Miscavige was not there, but I was supposed to be doing numerous things under his directions… I was on the phone to him every day, sometimes several times a day, and there were certain things that he was very unhappy… about, that weren’t done to his satisfaction… I was on the phone to him. I was in an office. Someone was pounding on the door. Because I was on the phone to him, I didn’t answer. I was trying to be on the phone and talk to him… The beating stopped and then someone pried the window open of the office that I was in and two big guys came in through the window. And Mr Miscavige said to me on the phone, “Are they there?” And I said, “Yes, they are.” And he said, “Goodbye.” And two men physically took me away to The Hole.’

The Hole, her evidence suggested, was a weird torture centre made out of two trailers on GOLD. Debbie told the court she was kept locked up in the trailers ‘infested with ants’ with other Scientologists for seven weeks as temperatures soared to 106 fahrenheit. Cook said: ‘I was put in a trash can, cold water poured over me, slapped, things like that.’

The Church vehemently denied her claims, calling them ‘outrageously false’.

It branded Cook a ‘heretic’ and withdrew its case to stop her using the court ‘as a forum’.

David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology flatly deny all allegations of abuse and violence.

The allegations of abuse and violence by the Leader of the Church, conducted in full view of senior members of the Church hierarchy with impunity, suggest evidence that the Leader is treated as a god. If so, the Church passes the first definer for a cult according to Robert Lifton, the world’s number one expert on mind control.

It is strange to think that Miscavige was Tom Cruise’s best man. The chasm between what Cruise and the Church say about the Chairman of the Board and what the ex-Scientologists say is deep.

Lifton’s next definer for a cult is brainwashing.

Back in 1961, Lifton in his book on brainwashing set out eight tests: ‘where totalism exists, a religion, a political movement, or even a scientific organization becomes little more than an exclusive cult.’ Lifton describes them as: ‘Milieu Control’, ‘Mystical Manipulation’, ‘The Demand for Purity’, ‘The Cult of Confession’, ‘The Sacred Science’, ‘Loading the Language’, ‘Doctrine over Person’ and ‘The Dispensing of Existence’.

Lifton sums up his eight tests: ‘The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform or “brainwashing”’.