Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(107)
The church provided an affidavit of a former Sea Org member, Yael Lustgarten, who stated that she was present at the meeting and that the attack by Miscavige never happened. She claims that Hawkins made a mess of his presentation—“He smelled of body odor, he was unshaven, his voice tone was very low and he could hardly be heard”—and he was merely instructed to shape up. On the other hand, Amy Scobee said she witnessed the attack—it was her cubicle the two men fell into—and after the altercation, she recalled, “I gathered all the buttons from Jeff’s shirt and the change from his pockets and gave them back to him.”
Tommy Davis later testified that he had conducted an investigation of the charges of abuse at the base. He said that all of the abuse had been committed by Rinder, Rathbun, and De Vocht—none by Miscavige.
TOM DE VOCHT GREW UP in a little central Florida town called Fort Meade. When he was ten years old, in 1974, his cousin, Dicky Thompson, a keyboardist in the Steve Miller Band, came to visit, riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. That year the band had a number one song, “The Joker,” and Thompson rode into town with a glow of fame around him. “He had a weird stare,” De Vocht remembered. “He invited my sister to meet Steve Miller and John Travolta.” Within a year, most of De Vocht’s family had joined the Church of Scientology. In July 1977, thirteen-year-old Tom De Vocht signed the billion-year contract for the Sea Org.
De Vocht became one of Miscavige’s allies and moved up the bureaucratic ladder quickly. In 1986, he was appointed the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org at Flag. In 2001, Miscavige called him, complaining, “Tom, I can’t get my building done.” The new headquarters for the Religious Technology Center at Gold Base, Building 50, was years behind schedule and well over budget. Miscavige directed De Vocht to come to Gold Base and oversee the construction. The first day he got there, De Vocht realized that “this building is going to be the end of me.”
Forty-seven million dollars—more than a thousand dollars per square foot—had previously been spent on the new center. The building had already been completed a couple of times, using the highest-grade materials—cold rolled steel, and anigre, a beautiful but extremely hard, pinkish African wood—only to have components ripped out because they didn’t meet Miscavige’s standards. Miscavige’s desk, also made of steel, was so heavy that De Vocht worried whether the structure would support it. He discovered that there were no actual architectural drawings for the building; there were only renderings of what it should look like. The stucco exterior walls were already cracked because the whole edifice was at a 1.25-inch tilt. The walls weren’t actually connected to the floors. Even a minor earthquake (Gold Base was just west of the San Andreas Fault) might cause the whole building to collapse. De Vocht recommended that the building be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, but Miscavige rejected that idea.
The expense of essentially rebuilding a poorly constructed building from the inside was immense. When De Vocht had almost finished construction, having spent an additional $60 million, Miscavige still had a list of complaints. He was also critical of the landscaping. Gold Base is in a desert, but Miscavige demanded that the building appear to be set in a forest.
One morning, De Vocht says, Miscavige and his wife were inspecting the large vault in the legal department of Building 50, when the leader stopped in his tracks and began rubbing his head. He turned pale. “Where did we put the gold bullion?” he asked his wife. For a full minute, Miscavige kept rubbing his head and asking about the gold, but then he snapped out of it and went on as if nothing had happened. De Vocht recalls that forty-five minutes later, Shelly Miscavige called him and asked him, “What are we going to do? He’s losing it.” She told him that Dave had gone “Type 3”—psychotic—because of all the Suppressive Persons at the base.3
While De Vocht was working on Building 50, he was forced to attend a séance with five hundred other Sea Org members on Gold Base. People were called out by name and asked, “What crimes have you committed against David Miscavige?” One after another, people approached the microphone and confessed to ways in which they were suppressing the dissemination of Scientology or thinking taboo thoughts. De Vocht was disgusted by the orgy of self-abasement. One night, he simply took over the meeting and brought some semblance of order to it. That night, Shelly Miscavige asked him to be the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, which essentially put him in charge of the entire base. “It’s out of control,” she pleaded, saying that her husband counted on him and had no one else to turn to.
In 2004, De Vocht finished reconstructing the 45,000-square-foot Building 50, which wound up costing $70 million. “You’re the biggest spender in the history of Scientology,” Miscavige told him. “You should be shot.”
EVEN THOUGH MEMBERSHIP in the church has been declining for years, according to polls and census figures, money continues to pour into Scientology coffers in fantastic sums. Donors are accorded higher status depending on the size of their gifts to the International Association of Scientologists—Patron Maximus for a $25 million pledge, for instance. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, became a Patron Laureate for her $10 million gift to the association in 2007. The IAS now holds more than $1 billion, mostly in offshore accounts, according to former executives of the church. Scientology coursework alone can be very pricey—as much as $400,000 to reach the level of OT VIII. That doesn’t count the books and materials or the latest-model E-Meter, which is priced at $4,650. Then there is the auditing, which ranges in price from $5,000 to $8,000 for a twelve-hour “intensive,” depending on the location and the level of the auditor. Services sold in Clearwater alone amount to $100 million a year.