Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(117)

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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.





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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.”