IN JUNE 2006, Shelly Miscavige disappeared.
She had spent her whole life conveying orders and gathering intelligence for a powerful, erratic, domineering church leader, first for Hubbard and then for her husband. She and Miscavige were always respectful toward each other in public, if not openly affectionate. As he gained power within the church, she began to see the two of them as reincarnations of Simón Bolívar and Manuela Sáenz, and the lesson she drew from that previous existence was that she needed to be fiercely protective of her mate, and to keep him from making the kinds of mistakes that his character was destined to commit. In the eyes of some Sea Org members, Shelly was brittle and imperious, but Rathbun noted that she sometimes objected when Miscavige’s physical assaults threatened to get out of hand. No one else did.
That spring, Shelly returned from a Freewinds voyage before her husband did, and in his absence she decided to arrange the Org Board herself. There were no settled posts, executives were still churning in the Hole, and the management structure was a mess. Taking matters into her own hands, Shelly made a number of appointments.
Soon after her husband came back, Shelly’s mood visibly changed. Her brother-in-law, John Brousseau, observed that she looked cowed: “The bulldog was gone.” Shortly before she disappeared, she asked Mike Rinder if Dave still had his wedding ring on. Then she vanished. Although a missing-person report has been filed, the Los Angeles Police Department will not comment on her whereabouts. She was escorted to her father’s funeral in August 2007. That’s the last time she was seen in public. Former Sea Org members say she is being guarded at a church facility in Running Springs, California, near Lake Arrowhead, one of the several repositories for Hubbard’s writings. It gets cold there in the winter. Miscavige sent Shelly a sweater and a pair of gloves for Christmas.
In November 2007, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes married in a fifteenth-century castle outside of Rome. Among the celebrities attending were Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Jenna Elfman, and even Brooke Shields. Once again, David Miscavige served as the best man.
* * *
1 Cruise’s attorney says that Sea Org members were not directed to salute him and that he has had many cordial exchanges with them.
2 According to Tommy Davis, “From their perspective, it was the least they could do to express their affection.”
3 According to Tommy Davis, “These incidents are pure fantasy by Tom De Vocht.”
4 The case against Cartwright was settled out of court.
5 Cruise’s attorney notes, “Mr. Cruise has never expressed anything but support and respect for the work on Battlefield Earth.”
6 Cruise’s attorney says Cruise did not complain about not having a girlfriend at the opening of the church in Madrid.
7 The church has stated, “Scientology ministers maintain and practice a code of conduct known as the Auditor’s Code. The Auditor’s Code provides standards to ensure that priest-penitent communications remain strictly confidential. All such information is kept strictly confidential by a Scientology minister and the Church.”
8 Cruise’s attorney says that this conversation never took place. According to Tommy Davis: “Katy did not lose her friend because she admitted she was gay, she lost her friend because Katy lied to her about being gay.”
9 Several sources independently told me of Boniadi’s experiences with Tom Cruise. All their recollections were consistent. Cruise’s attorney says that no Scientology executives set him up with girlfriends, and that no female Scientologist that Cruise dated moved into his home.
10 Also in the exhibit is a photograph of Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, known as Abu Dadah, who is described as a psychiatrist and the mastermind of the Madrid train bombings in 2004. Yarkas, an al-Qaeda fund-raiser, was a used-car salesman who had little or nothing to do with the Madrid bombings. In a list of 218 international known Islamist militants, the only one who ever studied psychology was Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian operative who helped plan the American Embassy bombings in 1998. “Psychologists are conspicuous by their absence,” Steffen Hertog, a lecturer in comparative politics at the London School of Economics, wrote me in a private communication. “The pattern is similar for other types of extremist groups: Among 215 leading German Nazis with known higher education, there are only 2 psychologists, compared to 71 lawyers.” In another Citizens Commission on Human Rights report, titled “Chaos and Terror: Manufactured by Psychiatry” (www.cchrstl.org/documents/terror.pdf), the supposed mastermind of the Madrid bombings is now said to be “Moroccan psychiatrist Abu Hafizah.” No such person exists on the list of known Islamist terrorists, nor is anyone by that name attached to the Madrid bombings.
11 The church denies Brousseau’s account. Cruise’s attorney denies that his client ever saw Miscavige’s motorcycle and claims,“We have photographic evidence showing the actual painter doing the job. It’s not Mr. Brousseau.” However, the attorney did not provide the photos. Brousseau did provide photos of the work he says he did on each of Cruise’s vehicles he claimed to have worked on.
10
The Investigation
Proposition 8, the California initiative to ban marriage between same-sex couples, appeared on the ballot in 2008. Paul Haggis was deeply involved in fighting the initiative, marching in demonstrations and contributing financially. His advocacy placed a strain on his relationship with Scientology. For several years, he had been concerned about the bigotry he found inside the church, especially when it was directed at his two gay daughters. Katy, in particular, had expressed her discomfort with the way she was treated at the Celebrity Centre, where she had been taking some courses. She had decided to go to another Scientology mission where she wouldn’t feel so judged.
One evening, Paul and Deborah went to a small fund-raising dinner at John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s house. Deborah and Kelly were on the parents’ committee to raise funds for a new Delphi school in Santa Monica. Several other couples were there, all of them Operating Thetans. One of the guests referred to the waiter as a faggot.
It is difficult to imagine such open bigotry in Hollywood, a liberal stronghold, but especially in the home of John Travolta, who has dodged rumors of his sexual orientation since he first became a star. Despite the onslaught of publicity and sexual harassment suits that have been lodged against the star over the years, many Scientologists, including Haggis, believed that Travolta was not gay. Haggis had been impressed by his apparently loving relationship with his wife and children; but it is also common to assume that homosexuality is handled at the OT III level, where the body thetans that cause such problems can be audited away. The other diners may have been so convinced of Travolta’s sexual orientation that they felt free to display their prejudice. In any case, Travolta reprimanded his guest, saying that such remarks were not tolerated in their home.
Haggis was flooded with admiration for the firm but graceful way that the star had handled the situation. After the other guests had departed, Haggis and Travolta had a conversation in his small study. They talked about the bigotry they had observed in the church. Haggis confided that Katy had been made to feel unwanted at the Celebrity Centre. Travolta said that Hubbard’s writings had been misinterpreted, and he later provided some references that Katy could use to defend herself.
When Hubbard wrote Dianetics, in 1950, he reflected the prevailing social prejudices, including the psychiatric community, which considered homosexuality a mental illness. (It was not removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1973.) “The sexual pervert”—by which Hubbard meant the homosexual—“is actually quite ill physically,” he writes. The following year, he published the Tone Scale in Science of Survival. Near the bottom, at 1.1 on the scale, is the Covertly Hostile personality. People in this state engage in casual sex, sadism—and homosexual activity. Hubbard describes this as “the most dangerous and wicked level.… Here is the person who smiles when he inserts a knife
blade between your vertebrae.” “This is the level of the pervert, the hypocrite, the turncoat. This is the level of the subversive.… A 1.1 is the most dangerously insane person in society and is likely to cause the most damage.… Such people should be taken from the society as rapidly as possible and uniformly institutionalized.” Another way of dealing with them, he writes, is “to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.” He went on: “The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.”
Hubbard occasionally moderated his stance, although he never entirely repudiated or discarded his prejudice. In 1952, he said, “Homosexuality is about as serious as sneezes.” In 1965, he refers in an executive letter to a “squirrel” who, he says, “was sacked for homosexuality and theft.” Another disaffected Scientologist, Hubbard notes in the same letter, “is a set-up for an arrest as a homosexual.” Two years later, when social attitudes toward gays were slowly changing, he declared, “It has never been any part of my plans to regulate or attempt to regulate the private lives of individuals.” However, because everything Hubbard wrote is sacrosanct in the church, these early views are indelibly fixed in the minds of many Scientologists. Long after the founder’s death it was still generally believed that auditing would “sort out” homosexuality. Gays in the church were frequently pressed to buy courses or take additional auditing in order to handle their condition.
The ambivalence in the church over the question of sexual orientation is evident in its treatment of Travolta. Over the years, the church has acted to protect his reputation. Marty Rathbun has said there were many allegations that he helped “to make go away.” He sometimes worked in concert with Travolta’s attorneys, attempting to keep stories out of the press. In 2003, a gay artist, Michael Pattinson, sued the church, Travolta, and more than twenty other individuals, claiming that the star had been held up as an example of how Scientology can cure homosexuality. Pattinson said that he spent twenty-five years in the church, and half a million dollars, trying to change his sexual orientation, without success. (That case was voluntarily withdrawn following an avalanche of countersuits. Both Pattinson and his attorney say they were driven into bankruptcy.)
Haggis identified with homosexuals because they were a minority. They were the underdogs. They were also two of his daughters. The backers of Proposition 8 were using scare tactics to drive their campaign, claiming that homosexuals were going to take over the schools and teach people to be gay. Lauren Haggis actually heard people saying that. Then someone pointed her to a website that listed the proposition’s backers. The Church of Scientology of San Diego was on the list. “I was just floored,” she said. “And so I sent an e-mail to my sisters and my dad saying, um, what’s going on?”
Haggis began peppering Tommy Davis with e-mails, demanding that the church support efforts to reverse the marriage ban. “I am going to an anti Prop 8 rally in a couple of hours,” he wrote on November 11, 2008, a week after the initiative passed with 52 percent of the state’s voters. “When can we expect the public statement?” Davis responded with a proposed letter that would go to the San Diego media, saying that the church had been “erroneously listed among the supporters of Proposition 8.” “ ‘Erroneous’ doesn’t cut it,” Haggis fired back. “The church may have had the luxury of not taking a position on this issue before, but after taking a position, even erroneously, it can no longer stand neutral.” He demanded that the church openly declare itself in favor of gay rights. “Anything less won’t do.”
Davis stopped responding. When Haggis prodded him again, Davis admitted that the correction to the San Diego media was never actually sent. “To be honest I was dismayed when our emails (which I thought were communications between us) were being cc’d to your daughters,” he wrote. Davis was frustrated because, as he explained to Haggis, the church avoids taking political stances.1 Davis insisted that it wasn’t the “church” in San Diego that adopted a position against Prop 8. “It was one guy who somehow got it in his head it would be a neat idea and put Church of Scientology San Diego on the list,” Davis insisted. “When I found out, I had it removed from the list.”
As far as Davis was concerned, that should have been the end of the matter. Any further actions on the part of the church would only call attention to a mistaken position on an issue that the church wanted to go away. “Paul, I’ve received no press inquiries,” he said. “If I were to make a statement on this it would actually bring more attention to the subject than if we leave it be.”
But Haggis refused to let the matter drop. “This is not a PR issue, it is a moral issue,” he wrote in February 2009. “Standing neutral is not an option.”
In the final note of this exchange, Haggis conceded, “You were right: nothing happened—it didn’t flap—at least not very much. But I feel we shamed ourselves.”
Since Haggis’s children had been copied on the correspondence with Davis, it helped clarify Lauren’s stance with the church. At first, Davis’s responses gave her hope, but then she realized, “They’re just trying to minimize it as much as possible.” After that, “I was totally done with the church.”
The experience also helped her to see her father in a different light. “It’s like night and day from when I first moved in with him,” she said. “I didn’t know that my dad loved me.”
BECAUSE HAGGIS STOPPED COMPLAINING, Davis felt that the issue had been laid to rest. But, far from putting the matter behind him, Haggis began an investigation into the church. His inquiry, much of it conducted online, echoed the actions of the lead character he was writing for Russell Crowe in The Next Three Days, who goes on the Internet to research a way to break his wife out of jail.
What is so striking about Haggis’s investigation is that few prominent figures attached to the Church of Scientology have actually looked into the charges that have surrounded their institution for many years. The church discourages such examination, telling its members that negative articles are “entheta” and will only cause spiritual upset. In 1996, the church sent CDs to members to help them build their own websites, which would then link them to the Scientology site; included in the software was a filter that would block any sites containing material that vilified the church or revealed esoteric doctrines. Keywords that triggered the censorship were Xenu, OT III, and the names of prominent Scientology critics.
Although Haggis never used such a filter, one already existed in his mind. During his thirty-four years in the church he had purposely avoided asking too many questions or reading materials that he knew would disparage his faith. But now, frustrated by his exchange with Davis, he began “poking around.” He came upon an interview on YouTube with Tommy Davis that had been broadcast by CNN in May 2008. “The worldwide interest in Scientology has never been higher,” Davis boasts on the show. “Scientology has grown more in the last five years than the last five decades combined.” The anchor, John Roberts, asks Davis about the church’s policy of disconnection, in which followers are urged to separate themselves from friends or family members who might be critical of the organization. “This is a perfect example of how the Internet turns things and twists things,” Davis responds. “There’s no such thing as disconnection as you’re characterizing it. And certainly, we have to understand—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts tries to interject.
“Scientology is a new religion,” Davis continues, talking over the host. “The majority of Scientologists in the world, they’re first generation. So their family members aren’t going to be Scientologists.… So, certainly, someone who is a Scientologist is going to respect their family members’ beliefs—”
“Well, what is disconnection?” Roberts asks again.
“And we consider family to be a building block of any society, so anything that’s characterized as disconnection, or this kind of
thing, it’s just not true. There isn’t any such policy.”
Haggis knew this was a lie. His wife, Deborah, had disconnected from her parents twice. When she was in her twenties and acting in Dallas, her mother and stepfather broke away from the church. They were close friends of Hana Eltringham, who had stood up for them at their wedding, so when they had doubts about their faith, they went to see her. Eltringham was then counseling people who were considering getting out of Scientology or other new religions. She helped Scientologists confront the contradictions that were implicit in their faith, such as Hubbard speaking of events that had taken place trillions or quadrillions of years in the past, although scientists estimate the age of the universe to be less than 14 billion years, or the fact that it has never been shown that anyone has ever obtained any enhanced OT abilities. Eltringham also talked about the abuses she observed and experienced. “Hana told us how Sea Org members were treated,” Mary Benjamin, Deborah’s mother, recalled, “how they were kept in a basement in Los Angeles and fed rice and beans if they didn’t keep their stats up. How, in the desert, in terrible heat, they would march in a circle for hours.”
Like many active members of the church, the Benjamins kept money on account—in their case, $2,500—for future courses they intended to take. Deborah’s mother insisted on getting the money back. Deborah knew what a big deal that was for the church. She didn’t speak to her parents for more than three years, automatically assuming that they must have been declared Suppressive Persons. But when her sister was about to get married, Deborah wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters, who said that she was allowed to see her parents as long as they didn’t say anything against Scientology. The Benjamins readily agreed.