Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(120)

“Okay, fine,” Deborah responded. “Go ahead and declare them. Maybe it’ll get better.”

The official then granted Deborah permission to begin upper-level coursework in Clearwater.

In August 2006, a formal notice on yellow parchment, called a “goldenrod,” was posted at the Celebrity Centre declaring Deborah’s parents Suppressive Persons, explaining that they had withdrawn the money they had placed on deposit for future coursework and that they had associated with “squirrels”—that is, they received unauthorized Scientology counseling. A month later, Mary Benjamin sent her daughter a letter. “We tried to do what you asked, Deborah. We worked the whole months of July & Aug. on A-E.” They gave the church back the $2,500 for the courses that they never intended to take. After all that, she continued, a church adjudicator had told them to hand out three hundred copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s booklet “The Way to Happiness” to libraries and to document each exchange with photographs. Her parents had had enough. “If this can’t be resolved, we will have to say Good-Bye to you & James will lose his Grand-Parents,” her mother wrote. “This is ridiculous.”

In April 2007, Deborah received a letter from the lawyer who represented her parents, threatening a lawsuit for the right to visit their grandson. Deborah had to hire an attorney. Eventually, the church relented. Deborah was summoned to the Celebrity Centre and shown a statement rescinding the decision, although she wasn’t allowed to have a copy of it.


WHILE HE WAS RESEARCHING on the Internet, Haggis came upon a series of articles that had run in the St. Petersburg Times3 beginning in June 2009, titled “The Truth Rundown.” The paper has maintained a special focus on Scientology, since the church maintains such a commanding presence in Clearwater, which is adjacent to St. Petersburg. Although the paper and the church have frequently been at odds, the only interview that David Miscavige has ever given to a newspaper resulted in a rather flattering profile in the Times in 1998. (Since then, Miscavige has not spoken to the press at all.)

In the series, Haggis learned for the first time that several of the top managers of the church had quietly defected—including Marty Rathbun. For several years, the word in the Scientology community was that Rathbun had died of cancer. Mike Rinder, the chief spokesperson, and Tom De Vocht, the former landlord of all the church properties in Clearwater, were also speaking out about the abuses that were taking place inside the top tier of management—mainly at the hands of the church leader. Amy Scobee, who had overseen the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, pointed out that the reason no one outside of the executive circles knew of the abuse, even other Scientologists like Haggis, was that people were terrified of Miscavige—and not just physically. Their greatest fear was expulsion. “You don’t have any money. You don’t have job experience. You don’t have anything. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you.”

Tommy Davis had produced nine senior church executives who told the Times that the abuse had never taken place. Dan Sherman, the church’s official Hubbard biographer and Miscavige’s speechwriter, recounted a scene in which he observed Miscavige talking to an injured sparrow. “It was immensely tender,” Sherman told the reporters.

Much of the abuse being alleged had taken place at Gold Base. Haggis had visited the place only once, in the early 1980s, when its existence was still a closely held secret. That was when he was preparing to direct the Scientology commercial that was ultimately rejected. At first glance, it seemed like a spa, beautiful and restful; but he had been put off by the uniforms, the security, and the militarized feel of the place.

“At the top of the church, people were whacking folks about like Laurel and Hardy,” Haggis said. He was embarrassed to admit that he had never even asked himself where Rathbun and Rinder had gone. He decided to call Rathbun, who was now living on Galveston Bay in South Texas. Although the two men had never met, they were well known to each other. After being one of the most powerful figures in Scientology, Rathbun was scraping together a living by freelancing stories to local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark. He figured that South Texas was about as far from Los Angeles and Clearwater as he could hope to get. Haggis was floored when he learned that Rathbun had had to escape. He was also surprised to learn that other friends, such as Jim Logan, the man who brought him into the church so long ago on the street corner in Ontario, had also fled or been declared Suppressive Persons. One of Haggis’s closest friends in the church hierarchy, Bill Dendiu, told Haggis that he had escaped from Gold Base by driving a car—actually, an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through the fence. He still had scars on his forehead to show for that.

“What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?” Haggis wondered.

He also came across a number of anti-Scientology websites, including Exscientologykids.com, which was created by Jenna Miscavige Hill, the leader’s niece, who joined the Sea Org when she was twelve. For her and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the organization, leaving them ill prepared for life outside the church. Jenna says that for much of her early life, she was kept in a camp with other Sea Org children and little adult supervision. They rarely saw their parents. “We ran ourselves completely,” she recalled.

For several years, Haggis had been working with a charity he established to set up schools in Haiti. These stories reminded him of the child slaves he had encountered in that country. “They were ten, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their parents go along with this!” he said of the Sea Org children. “And they work morning, noon and night.… Scrubbing pots, manual labor—that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me!”