Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(103)

Rathbun was seen as being COB’s chief enforcer. During meetings in the Hole or elsewhere on the base, he would stand to one side and glare at his colleagues while he says Miscavige berated and abused them. Although he was physically intimidating, Rathbun was suffering from a number of physical ailments, including a bad back, gallstones, calcium deposits in his neck, and painful varicose veins, which he believed came from having to stand at attention for hours on end. He, too, was prone to bursts of sudden violence. “Once on a phone call I saw him get so mad that he put his fist right through a computer screen,” his former wife recalled. Miscavige would send him down to observe what was going on in the Hole and come back with reports. In January 2004, when Rinder was accused of withholding a confession from the group, Rathbun took him outside and beat him up. Rathbun says Miscavige wasn’t satisfied. He called Rathbun into his massive office in the Religious Technology Center, a cold and imposing room with steel walls and eighteen-foot ceilings, and accused him of letting Rinder “get away with murder.” Then, according to Rathbun, out of nowhere, Miscavige grabbed him by the throat and slammed his head against the steel wall.5 Rathbun blacked out for a moment. He wasn’t hurt, but the terms had changed.

A few days later, Rathbun found himself in the Hole, along with the entire International Management team and other executives. Miscavige said they were going to stay there until they got the Org Board done.

Scientologists are trained to believe that whatever happens to them is somehow their fault, so much of the discussion in the Hole centered on what they had done to deserve this fate. The possibility that the leader of the church might be irrational or even insane was so taboo that no one could even think it, much less voice it aloud. Most of the people in the Hole had a strong allegiance to the group—Scientology and the Sea Org—and they didn’t want to let their comrades down. Many had been in the Sea Org their entire adult lives and portions of their childhood. Mike Rinder joined the Sea Org when he was eighteen. Amy Scobee was sixteen. Tom De Vocht was thirteen. They had already surrendered the possibility of ordinary family life. Sex outside of marriage was taboo, so many members married in their teens; but since 1986, children have been forbidden to Sea Org members. Former church executives say that abortions were common and forcefully encouraged. Claire Headley married Marc when she was seventeen; by the time she was twenty-one she had been pushed to have two abortions. She estimates that sixty to eighty percent of the women on Gold Base have had abortions. “It’s a constant practice,” she said.6

Worried about pillow talk, Miscavige instituted a policy of imposed divorces in 2004; people in the Religious Technology Center, the Commodore’s Messenger Organization, and Golden Era Productions could not be married to members in other divisions. For many of those people in the Hole, everyone they knew or cared about was in the church. The cost of leaving—emotionally and spiritually, as well as financially—was forbidding. And they knew if they tried to run away, they’d likely be found and punished.

Those who attempted to leave the Sea Org through the formal process of “routing out” would be presented with a freeloader tab for all the coursework and counseling they had received over the years. Claire and Marc Headley, for instance, were billed more than $150,000 when they left and told they would have to pay if they ever wanted to see their family again. Those who accept this offer can spend years paying off their debt. Those who don’t stand to lose any connection to their friends and family who remain in Scientology.

Many had long since turned their back on friends and family who were not in the church, and the prospect of facing them again brought up feelings of shame. The thought of leaving loved ones still in the church was even more fraught. All of these conflicting emotions were informed by the Scientology theory that life goes on and on, and that the mission of the church is to clear the planet, so in the scheme of things the misery one might be suffering now is temporary and negligible. There is a larger goal. One is always working for “the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics,” as Scientology ethics prescribed. And so the executives of the church who had given their lives to the Sea Org directed their confusion and their anger inward, or toward their helpless colleagues.

Rinder was an inevitable target. He was seen as being arrogant and above it all. Few people other than Rathbun really understood Rinder’s job; unlike the others, the two men were often off the base, dealing with lawyers, the government, and the press. No doubt there was resentment at work as well. The next time the Sea Org executives turned on Rinder, Rathbun exploded. He caught his friend in a headlock and slammed him to the ground, then sat astride him, pounding his head into the floor and shouting at him, nose to nose. Rinder managed to whisper, “Marty, I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

Suddenly, Rathbun froze. Words had been spoken that broke the spell. But it was only a moment.

One evening about eight o’clock, Miscavige arrived, with his wife and his Communicator, Shelly and Laurisse, flanking him as usual with tape recorders in their hands. He ordered that the conference table be taken away and chairs be brought in for everyone in the Hole—about seventy people at the time, including many of the most senior people in the Sea Org. He asked if anyone knew what “musical chairs” meant. In Scientology, it refers to frequent changes of post. About five hundred people had been moved off their jobs in the last five years, creating anarchy in the management structure. But that wasn’t the point he was trying to make. Finally, someone suggested that it was also a game. Miscavige had him explain the rules: Chairs are arranged in a circle and then, as the players march around them, one chair is removed. When the music stops, everybody grabs a seat. The one left standing is eliminated. Then the music starts again. Miscavige explained that in this game the last person to grab a chair would be the only one allowed to stay on the base; everyone else was to be “offloaded”—kicked out of the Sea Org—or sent away to the least desirable Scientology bases around the world. Those whose spouses were not in the Hole would be forced to divorce.