Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(139)
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.”