The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (7 page)

They both felt that it was a pay-as-you-go religion. Donna spent a decade inside the Church, spending $1million. Mike spent $500,000.

But worse, far worse, than the money is the effect on family life.

Mike said: ‘I have 35 family members in Scientology: my mother, my brother, my four sisters, my 22 nieces and nephews, and my son. And the only ones that are outside the church are myself, my daughter, and my father. And everyone is estranged that is not in the Church. My father’s kids won’t speak to him with me being the exception. And I didn’t speak to him for four years. And after I left the Church I re-established ties with him and it is difficult to describe how a man of 76 years whose proudest accomplishment in life is his six children, and they won’t speak to him.’

Mike, a great haystack of a man, was crying his eyes out. It was unbearably moving.

I told Donna and Mike that the Church’s spokesmen had offered us access on condition that we did not use the word cult.

Donna said: ‘If you actually understand what a cult is, look it up in the dictionary, all of the things fit. It is funny to me that when you first get into Scientology you are trained on how to handle people that tell you it is a cult. They say they have nothing hidden. Everything is hidden. The Xenu story is hidden. The staff conditions are hidden, the real agenda of Scientology is hidden. They are not there clearing the planet, they are out there getting money. It is a con game. They are a cult.’

After the main interviews, Bill Browne, our cameraman, took some set-up shots of Donna and Mike. I powered up my phone and BBC Radio Five came on, asking me for a reaction to the news that Sally Clark had died. Sally was the English mother of two baby boys who suffered cot deaths. Cruelly, she was charged, tried and convicted of murdering them, in part on the evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow who told the jury that the chances of this happening naturally were ‘73 million to one’.

One of my first radio documentaries for BBC Radio Five in 2001 was called ‘73 million to one’ in which that number, and much of the rest of Sir Roy’s expertise, was demolished, and we set out the evidence that Sally had been the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Two years later she was freed by the Court of Appeal, but the trauma of false accusation and prison had broken Sally’s heart. I gave Radio Five an interview, switched off the phone, and in the middle of a country park in Florida I burst into tears, grieving for a good woman destroyed by bigotry. And then it was back to the day job.

Mike and Donna took us on a tour of Scientology Town, past the Power building, a half-built monstrosity, still being completed after years and years of refurbishment, past the Fort Harrison hotel where the Operating Thetans do their courses. We got out of the car and filmed them walking around Clearwater pointing out all the sites. We expected to be filmed or challenged. But downtown Clearwater was eerily quiet, as if the whole Scientology population had been ordered to keep off the streets lest Bill film them off-guard.

We took Donna and Mike to dinner to thank them for their time. I knocked back a bit of wine while Mole scowled at me. Surely, I was allowed some time off? It was late when we said our goodbyes to Donna and Mike. We got back to our hotel in Clearwater at midnight, to find the Church of Scientology waiting for us in the lobby.

CHAPTER THREE

Ill-met at midnight

T
ommy Davis and Mike Rinder were sitting in the hotel’s comfy chairs along with a Scientology cameraman, clad in black. Damn the wine. I should have drunk lemonade.

‘Hi Mike, Hi Tommy,’ I said, as if it was perfectly natural to bump into two Scientologists in your hotel lobby at midnight, and proffered my hand.

‘I’m not going to shake your hand,’ said Tommy, rising from his chair. He was wearing a suit, dark tie and white shirt. ‘I find it considerably obnoxious what you’ve done. The time that I took – spent two days with you straight. Offer you cooperation and who do you spend your time with?’

His tone was that of an outraged Victorian husband furious that his young wife had dallied at the regimental ball of the 19th Foot and returned at midnight with a tendril of hair uncoiled and her bonnet askew.

The Scientology cameraman was fully kitted out with camera top light and microphone on a lead, so he could catch every word of Tommy berating me for my atrocious conduct. It was the perfect video ambush – or it would have been had not Mole brought along a small video camera to dinner, just in case. They were video-ambushing us. We were video-ambushing them back. The Scientology cameraman switched on his light. I engaged with him: ‘Hi I’m John Sweeney from the BBC.’ He said nothing but we later found out his name was Jesse Radstrom.

‘And you spend the day with Mike Henderson and Donna Shannon? What are these people?’ said Tommy, full of wounded pride. ‘The people who you spent the day with?’ I stepped away from Tommy. He stepped towards me. Mike Rinder edged closer to me, the cameraman boxing me in.

‘Ok, from my perspective?’ Suddenly, I was sober as Mr Justice Latey. ‘Are you sure you’re getting good sound? Shall I hold that?’ I grasped the microphone wielded by the black-clad cameraman and opened fire. ‘You’ – Tommy - ‘and you’ – Mike - ‘and the Church of Scientology have been spying on the BBC. You have been spying on our hotel. We didn’t tell you where we were staying so you’ve been spying on us. And I find that, if I may say so, a little bit creepy. Here’s your microphone’ – and I handed it back, not to the cameraman, but to Tommy.

‘Thanks,’ said Tommy, perhaps – I might be wrong – a little forlornly.

I hadn’t finished. ‘And secondly, what’s wrong with talking to people who are critical in an open society, who are critical of an institution?’

‘Nothing,’ said Tommy.

‘Have they no right to speak?’

‘There is nothing wrong with that. But that’s not what I’m taking about.’

The hotel receptionist was not used to this kind of theatre of absurd in her lobby at midnight. She said: ‘Excuse me, you two need to go outside or I will call the police.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘but you can do that anyway.’

I walked out into the fresh air, and Tommy, Mike and the Man in Black followed me out. I still hadn’t finished: ‘So the question is: have you been spying on us?’

‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘The locals in town were talking,’ said Tommy. ‘A camera crew – an English guy.’

The population of Clearwater is 100,000. It being a BBC Current Affairs budget, we were staying in an adequate hotel with fine views of a freeway on stilts, a good few miles out of town.

‘Oh and they said they’re staying at this hotel?’

‘Yeah. Absolutely. But that’s immaterial,’ said Tommy.

‘It’s not immaterial. Because it means that you’re invading our space. We’re not going to come round to where you sleep and say hello. And come in the middle of the night. Don’t you think that’s a bit weird? A little bit strange?’

‘You know what? I’m not even going to talk about it. We spent two days with you. We offered you so much and what happened in return?’

If you work in television, two days not filming is two days wasted. I batted back his offer of ‘so much’, calling it nothing.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Tommy, incredulous at my stony lack of gratitude. He was back to doing his outraged Victorian husband routine. I had lost my bonnet for good. This palaver went on for what seemed like a very long time. I put it to Tommy that Donna had told me she had seen people grab him by the hair. He denied it. He accused Donna of demanding money from the Church, of being an extortionist. Then it was back to attacking me: ‘What is baffling to us is that we tell you we’re open and willing to communicate…’

And then the Clearwater Police Department cruiser turned up. The police officer got out of the car and sized the situation up: two men in suits and a cameraman in black filming one man and a woman and a cameraman filming them. Or the other way around. The police officer asked: ‘The hotel wanted to know what you are filming?’

‘We’re filming each other…’ I replied, unhelpfully.

‘So who’s staying here? I guess for the rest if you want to get a room… otherwise you might want to get going.’

Tommy and Mike started backing off into the night: ‘That’s fine we don’t want to cause any trouble…’

Tommy shook the police officer’s hand, and they were gone.

The next morning we discovered that the Church was opening a new Org in Plant City, an hour’s drive east of Clearwater. We thought we would pop along and see the opening for ourselves. Scientology’s favourite colour is uranium yellow – and there was a sea of yellow bunting and tents and a lot of people milling around, none of whom would talk to us and one, two, three Scientology camera people who filmed us. After a knife-slash of time, a PR lady called Pat Harney found us. I wanted to go into the new Org and look around. Would that be possible?

‘No,’ Pat said firmly but sweetly, ‘but you can come over here with me.’

Why no?

‘From all the reports I’ve heard, you haven’t exactly been very friendly.’

I told her I was a pussycat. Nothing doing. After a fair while  Mole’s face split into two halves, horizontally. I couldn’t work out why she was so happy, but she motioned behind my back. I turned around to see Tommy, looking extremely natty in dark sunglasses. He’d changed his tie, swapping the dark one he’d worn the previous night for a striped black and white number.

‘Hello Tommy!’ I squeaked. ‘How are you? I was just wondering where you were, and there you are, fantastic. How did you know we were here?’

‘I actually didn’t, we have the opening here so I was going to that.’

‘Very good,’ I replied. (By the way, if you shoot me in the foot, I would say: ‘Very good.’ It’s a phrase I use when I mean the exact opposite.)

Yackety-yack, we went, yackety-yack. Tommy said that of course the Church would have offered us access to Plant City had we asked the previous night. I replied, words to the effect that it might have slipped my mind after he turned up at the hotel at midnight, and ‘that was rather…’

…Clickerty-clack, clackerty-click. An enormously long goods train thundered by. What was odd was that both Tommy and I knew there was no point in saying anything to each other because the sound would be too poor quality for our respective audiences: for me, the BBC’s viewers, for Tommy, who knew? Clackerty-click… I’ve always wanted to stow away on an American goods train and see where I’d end up – Hoboken? Somewhere in Alaska? – but now wasn’t the time. Still, I cannot see a good trains in America without marvelling at the country’s immensity. Clickerty-clack, clickerty-clack, clickerty-clack, into the distance…

‘…creepy,’ I finished.

‘Not nearly as creepy,’ answered Tommy, as showing up at LRH’s birthday event and asking to interview the Leader.’

Who is the creepiest? That is the question. We tossed that around for a bit. I mentioned their conditions for access, including no mention of the word ‘cult’. He called me: ‘disingenuous’, ‘shocking’ and ‘utterly unprofessional’. He talked about them being open; I challenged his attack on the meaning of words.

‘I have a real problem with your use of the English language,’ I said. ‘You say you are open and everywhere we go the doors are closed: “you are not coming in.” But what does happen is, we have another silent gentleman here filming us.’

I pointed to a Scientology cameraman, doing exactly that. Tommy replied: ‘We are absolutely filming it because you don’t know how to conduct yourself. We are actually documenting your bias and all the things that you are doing. You are in violation of OfCom’ – the British agency that controls broadcasting standards – ‘and your broadcasting guidelines because of how you are conducting yourselves and the unprofessionalism and how rude it is. And we have a world wide religious movement, millions of members…’

On and on we went, on and on. Donna and Mike, space aliens, the cult-word – I fired at him. Notoriety seekers, ignorance, bigotry – he fired back. The only worry was would we run out of tape? Would Bill’s battery run flat? We carried on clobbering each other like the Black Knight and his adversary in
Monty
Python And the Holy Grail.
And then Tommy said something rather troubling.

‘Well, I give the little badge of honour for you. I know where you live.’

‘What do you mean you know where I live?’

‘Like I know where you reside as a person. Your… your basis of… I don’t know where your house is, no, I don’t know where your house is. I have no interest in knowing where your house is.’

He seemed to be doubling back on what he had just said, as if he had said it to taunt me, then realised that it was a foolish own-goal.

Did the Church of Scientology know where I lived? A few weeks later, after we had returned to London, one of my neighbours in Wimbledon, Anne Layther, told me that her 11-year-old son answered the door to a stranger. She described him to me as blond, very well-spoken Englishman, 5’7”, thin. He was carrying a rucksack and wearing a cap and struck Anne as ‘odd’. He said that he was looking for John Sweeney. Anne said she gestured vaguely that I lived in that direction. He said something like: ‘I’ve just come from there. Do you know if he’s away?’ He went away and returned ten minutes later, saying: ‘I’ve got a package for him.’

‘Who are you?’ Anne asked.

A courier, he said, but he struck Anne as being not right, too posh, for that kind of job. He said the package was for ‘John Sweeney of the BBC.’ Anne offered to take the package for him but he said he needed to check with his boss. Anne went out to her back garden and called out to me. I came out into our back garden. I had been home the whole time, but the mystery courier with his package looking for me had never thought to knock on my door. How very odd.

Back at Plant City, Tommy moved away from where I lived to what he called my partially unveiled attack on his religion, my disingenuousness and my twisting of what he was telling me.

‘It is wholly absurd,’ I replied. ‘The question is: is your organisation an honest and open organization? Can the word of the Church of Scientology be trusted? And the answer is well they are very strange. They are actually a little bit creepy because they come along to my hotel…’