After the screening, everyone drifted over to the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel. Haggis was in a corner receiving accolades from his friends when I found him. I asked if he felt that he had finally left Scientology. “I feel much more myself, but there’s a sadness,” he admitted. “If you identify yourself with something for so long, and suddenly you think of yourself as not that thing, it leaves a bit of space.” He went on, “It’s not really the sense of a loss of community. Those people who walked away from me were never really my friends.” He understood how they felt about him, and why. “In Scientology, in the Ethics Conditions, as you go down from Normal through Doubt, you get to Enemy, and finally, near the bottom, there is Treason. What I did was a treasonous act.”
The film did poorly at the box office. It had the misfortune of opening to mixed reviews on the same night that the last installment of the Harry Potter series premiered. Haggis had to close his office. It looked like another bleak period in his career, but he followed it by writing a screenplay for a video game, Modern Warfare 3, which would go on to set a sales record, earning $1 billion in the first sixteen days after its release.
I once asked Haggis about the future of his relationship with Scientology. “These people have long memories,” he told me. “My bet is that, within two years, you’re going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.”
MARTY RATHBUN DIVIDES the people who leave Scientology into three camps. There are those who reject the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard entirely, such as Paul Haggis; and those who still believe entirely, but think that the church under David Miscavige has taken Scientology away from the original, true teachings of the founder. There is a third category, which he has been struggling to define, that includes those people who are willing neither to swallow all the dogma nor to throw away the insights they gained from their experience. Hubbard’s life and teachings are still the guideposts of their lives. “It wouldn’t stick if there wasn’t a tremendous amount of good it did for them,” Rathbun says. He’s been studying the history of other religions for parallels, and he quotes an old Zen proverb: “When the master points at the Moon, many people never see it at all, they only look at the master.”
Rathbun has been counseling Scientologists who leave the church, and because of that he’s been subject to continual monitoring and harassment from the church. His computers have been hacked and phone records have been stolen. A group of “Squirrel Busters” moved into his little community of Ingleside on the Bay, near Corpus Christi, in order to spy on him and drive him away through constant harassment. They wore video cameras on their hats and patrolled the neighborhood in a golf cart or occasionally a paddleboat. This lasted for 199 days. That tactic didn’t work, because his neighbors rallied to his support. Many other defectors have been harassed and followed by private investigators.
On a sweltering Fourth of July weekend, 2011, a group of about a hundred “independent” Scientologists gathered at a lake cabin in East Texas. Rathbun and Mike Rinder had organized it. A few courageous swimmers were leaping off the dock, but rumors of alligators kept most people on the shore. A brief, powerful storm rolled through, driving everyone to shelter.
One of the attendees was Stephen Pfauth, known as Sarge, a Vietnam veteran who had gotten into Scientology in 1975. He is a slender man with haunted eyes. “It was one of those sudden things that happened,” he explained. “I was looking for something, especially spiritually.” He had run across an advertisement on the back of a magazine for Hubbard’s book Fundamentals of Thought. Soon after reading it, he flew to Washington, DC, and took a three-day workshop called Life Repair Auditing. “I was blown away.” He immediately quit his job. “I sold my house and bought the Bridge.” Soon, a church official began cultivating him, saying, “LRH needs your help.” Pfauth joined the Sea Org that November.
He became head of Hubbard’s security detail, and was with the founder on his Creston ranch in his final days, with Pat and Annie Broeker. In early 1985, Hubbard became extremely ill and spent a week in a hospital. Pfauth was told it was for pancreatitis. “I didn’t find out about the strokes until later,” he said. After that, Hubbard stayed mostly in his Blue Bird bus, except when he came out to do his own laundry. Pfauth might be shoveling out the stables and they’d talk.
Marty Rathbun with an E-Meter at his home in Ingleside on the Bay, Texas, 2011
Six weeks before the leader died, Pfauth hesitantly related, Hubbard called him into the bus. He was sitting in his little breakfast nook. “He told me he was dropping his body. He named a specific star he was going to circle. That rehabs a being. He told me he’d failed, he’s leaving,” Pfauth said. “He said he’s not coming back here to Earth. He didn’t know where he’d wind up.”
“How’d you react?” I asked.
“I got good and pissy-ass drunk,” Pfauth said. “Annie found me at five in the morning in my old truck, Kris Kringle, and I had beer cans all around me. I did not take it well.”
I mentioned the legend in Scientology that Hubbard will return.
“That’s bull crap,” Pfauth said. “He wanted to drop the body and leave. And he told me basically that he’d failed. All the work and everything, he’d failed.”
I had heard a story that Pfauth had built some kind of electroshock mechanism for Hubbard in the last month of his life. I didn’t know what to make of it, given Hubbard’s horror of electroshock therapy. Pfauth’s eyes searched the ceiling as if he were looking for divine help. He explained that Hubbard was having trouble getting rid of a body thetan. “He wanted me to build a machine that would up the voltage and basically blow the thetan away. You can’t kill a thetan but just get him out of there. And also kill the body.”
“So it was a suicide machine?”
“Basically.”
Pfauth was staggered by Hubbard’s request, but the challenge interested him. “I figured that building a Tesla coil was the best way to go.” The Tesla coil is a transformer that increases the voltage without upping the current. Pfauth powered it with a 12-volt automobile battery, and then hooked the entire apparatus to an E-Meter. “So, if you’re on the cans, you can flip a button and it does its thing,” Pfauth explained. “I didn’t want to kill him, just to scare him.”
“Did he try it?”
“He blew up my E-Meter. Annie brought it back to me, all burnt up.”
This was just before Christmas, 1985. Hubbard died a few weeks later of an unrelated stroke.
The believers are still waiting for his return.
* * *
1 City Children, Country Summer (Scribner’s, 1979).
Acknowledgments and a Note on Sources
Compared with other religions I have written about, the published literature on Scientology is impoverished and clouded by bogus assertions. Some crucial details one would want to know about the church have been withheld—for instance, the number of people who are members of the International Association of Scientologists, which would be the best guide to knowing the true dimensions of the church’s membership. The church promised to provide an organizational chart, but never did so; in any case, it would have been more notional than actual in terms of the flow of authority and responsibility, since many of the church’s executive hierarchy have been quarantined for years in the Hole at the direction of the only individual who controls the institution.
L. Ron Hubbard’s extensive—indeed, record-breaking—published works form the core of the documentary material that this book draws upon. Hubbard expressed himself variously in books, articles, bulletins, letters, lectures, and journals; one cannot understand the man or the organization he created without examining his work in each of these media. The church has published a useful compendium of Hubbard’s thought in What Is Scientology? Although the church employs a full-time Hubbard biographer and has commissioned severa
l comprehensive works in the past, there is still no authorized account of Hubbard’s life. One of the previous Hubbard biographers, Omar Garrison, did write a full-scale account of Hubbard’s life, which was suppressed. The church has published a series of Ron magazines, which have been compiled as a highly selective encyclopedia. For years, the church has been mopping up other documents—journals, letters, photographs—and withholding them from public view, which makes it difficult for independent researchers to fill in blanks in the historical record.
There are several important repositories of information that I have used in this book, however: the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; the Heinlein Prize Trust and the UC Santa Cruz Archives; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas; and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The Stephen A. Kent Collection on Alternative Religions, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, houses an important collection of Scientology material, and Professor Kent graciously allowed my assistant, Lauren Wolf, to work in his archive. In addition to being an endless source of memories on the history of the church, Karen de la Carriere made her extensive photographic archive available. Many thanks to these valuable resources for their cooperation.
There are three major unauthorized biographies of L. Ron Hubbard: Russell Miller’s excellent Bare-Faced Messiah (1987) was the first in-depth look at the man. Scientology unsuccessfully sued Miller, a British journalist, who says that while researching his book he was spied upon, his phone was tapped, and efforts were made to frame him for a murder he did not commit. Soon thereafter, Bent Corydon’s L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? (1987) appeared, followed by Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky (1990). The church attempts to discredit both of these authors because they are former Scientologists who the church says were expelled from the organization. It is notable that no comprehensive biography of Hubbard has been attempted since the church’s campaign against these books.
The scarcity of academic work on the church and its leaders testifies to the caution with which scholars regard the subject, as well as the reluctance of the organization to divulge information about its members, beliefs, and inner workings to qualified social scientists. In 1976, Roy Wallis published The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology, the first significant academic study of the church. While he was researching his book, Wallis was spied upon, and forged letters were sent to his colleagues and employers implicating him in a homosexual relationship. Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect, an insightful book by Harriet Whitehead, an anthropologist, appeared in 1987. Since then, contributions from the academy have been meager. At this point, I should also acknowledge the work of Hugh Urban, at Ohio State University, David S. Touretzky at Carnegie Mellon University, and Stephen Kent, at the University of Alberta. Each of these scholars has produced important contributions to the understanding of Scientology, despite the obstacles and threats posed by the church.
Court documents contain a valuable record of the history and culture of the church and its founder; this is especially true of the landmark 1991 suit Church of Scientology California vs. Gerald Armstrong. David Miscavige has been shy about giving interviews, but he has provided testimony and declarations in several lawsuits, most extensively in 1990, in Bent Corydon v. Church of Scientology.
A handful of courageous journalists have provided much of the essential information available about the culture of Scientology. Paulette Cooper opened the door with her 1971 exposé, The Scandal of Scientology. I have outlined in this book some of the harassment that she endured. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos of the Los Angeles Times did a remarkable six-part series in 1990. Richard Leiby has been writing about Scientology since the early 1980s, first for the Clearwater Sun and subsequently for the Washington Post. Richard Behar covered the subject in Barron’s and most notably in his 1991 exposé for Time, “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.” Janet Reitman had unparalleled access to the church for her 2006 Rolling Stone article, “Inside Scientology,” which became a book of the same title in 2011. Chris Owen, an independent researcher, has written extensively about the church online, and has revealed much of the information available about Hubbard’s wartime experiences. Tom Smith has conducted a number of knowledgeable interviews on his radio show, The Edge, broadcast by Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida. Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin of the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) have written groundbreaking stories, especially about the abuse inside the church hierarchy. Tony Ortega has been writing about Scientology since 1995, for the Phoenix New Times, and he continued as a valuable resource in the pages and the blog of the Village Voice until his recent resignation. Several of these journalists have been harassed, investigated, sued, or threatened in various ways. I am the beneficiary of their skill and persistence.
In the last decade, defectors from the Sea Org have provided a rich trove of personal accounts. These have taken the form of memoirs and blog postings, and they have accumulated into an immense indictment of the inner workings of the church. Among the memoirs I should single out are Marc Headley’s Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (2009); Nancy Many’s My Billion Year Contract (2009); Amy Scobee’s Abuse at the Top (2010); and Jefferson Hawkins’s Counterfeit Dreams (2010). Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger (2012) provides an especially interesting account of the Apollo days.
Websites devoted to challenging the church have proliferated, beginning with alt.religion.scientology in 1991. Some of the most active are Andreas Heldal-Lund’s Operation Clambake at xenu.net; Steve Hall’s scientology-cult.com; Arnaldo Lerma’s lermanet.com, and the Ex Scientology Message Board, which is an online community for former members of the church, founded by “Emma” and now run by “Mick Wenlock and Ethercat.” Exscientologykids.org, started by Jenna Miscavige Hill, David Miscavige’s niece, among others, played an important role in Paul Haggis’s decision to leave the church. Although many of the postings on these websites are anonymous, they provide rich texture to a subculture that few outsiders can appreciate.
One blog has become a rallying point for “independent” Scientologists who have renounced the official church: Marty Rathbun’s Moving on Up a Little Higher, which began in 2009. It has been the source of many telling personal stories, as well as documents leaked by church insiders. Rathbun and his wife, Monique Carle, have suffered constant harassment, along with surveillance by private investigators, because of his open challenge to Miscavige’s authority.
In researching this book, I conducted hundreds of interviews, the preponderance of them on the record. I have always been sparing in relying on anonymous sources, but writing about Scientology poses a challenge for a reporter. A number of my sources were fearful of retribution by the church—in particular, legal harassment and the loss of contact with family members. Many key individuals have signed confidentiality agreements that enforce their silence. I owe all my sources a great debt of gratitude for their willingness to speak to me despite the risk to their own well-being.
Paul Haggis plays a unique role in this book. He never intended to talk publicly about his experience in the church. That he opened up to me, knowing the church’s reputation for retribution, is a measure of his courage and his forthrightness.
This book is dedicated to my colleagues at The New Yorker, and so my list of debts includes the many people there who assisted me in writing the profile of Paul Haggis (“The Apostate,” Feb. 14 and 21, 2011) that became the starting point for my research into Scientology. I had talked previously with David Remnick, the editor of the magazine, about an article on the Church of Scientology. David appreciated the legal hazards, but I don’t think either of us realized the amount of time and resources the piece would ultimately require. His commitment was all the more meaningful coming during a period when the magazine was under the same financial stress that other print media were experiencing. My editor at The New Yorker,
Daniel Zalewski, has shepherded me through many articles, and his steadiness and advocacy are always deeply appreciated. Daniel’s assistant at the time, Yvette Siegert, cheerfully flew to St. Louis as our deadline approached to fetch L. Ron Hubbard’s military records from the archives there. Lynn Oberlander, the magazine’s lawyer, was a stalwart ally, undaunted by the legal team arrayed by the church and by certain celebrities who were mentioned in the article. Ann Goldstein, the magazine’s copy chief, did her usual careful and respectful job. Nick Traverse and Kelly Bare labored to put the thousands of pages of documents on the Cloud—a highly experimental procedure at this old-school magazine—so that we could all have access to the same material simultaneously. I want to pay particular tribute to the New Yorker fact-checking department, headed by Peter Canby. Jennifer Stahl was the lead checker, spending six months full-time on the piece; her scrupulousness was inspiring, and she commanded the respect of everyone who dealt with her. Tim Farrington also worked intensely on the article. Eventually, a good portion of the department pitched in, including Nandi Rodrigo, Mike Spies, Katia Bachko, and even Peter himself. To be supported by such truly professional colleagues means so much.