Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(64)

The next morning, David moved in. Scott took him shopping and then to a pub, where he bought him a Coke. Scott also got a nonalcoholic drink. They chatted with some other Scientology auditors and David began to warm up. He seemed pleased to be around auditors, but Scott felt that there was “a certain falseness” in his behavior.

They went back to Scott’s quarters and watched television, then turned in around ten. Scott placed David in the bed by the window, which was cracked to give him some fresh air. David went right to sleep. Scott was used to the rattle of asthmatic breathing, so he soon fell asleep as well.

Scott remembers hearing a scream around one o’clock. He jumped up and turned on the light. David was leaning on the bed with one arm. His face was blue and his eyes were rolled back. Scott had never seen anything like it. He started to touch him, but drew back and performed a Scientology “assist.” He said, “That’s it, David, come up to present time,” repeating the command twice. David blinked and then jolted awake. He was still disoriented, so Scott performed another Scientology exercise, called a locational: “Look at that wall. Look at that bed.” Slowly, David began to focus. Finally he asked Scott, “Did I hit you?”

“No.”

“Whew!”

David was still groggy and quickly went back to sleep, but Scott was unsettled. He watched the boy for another hour before drifting off again himself.

In the morning, David remembered nothing of what had happened during the night. He got ready to take a shower. When he took off his pajama top, Scott did a double take. He had never seen a thirteen-year-old boy with such muscles. “This kid is built like Arnold Schwarzenegger!” he thought. “A young, very small Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

While David was in the shower, Scott took a look at the medication on his nightstand. He remembers seeing two bottles and two inhalers. One of the inhalers was a typical over-the-counter medication, but all the others contained steroids. Scott had grown up on a farm, and he had used steroids to treat some diseases in animals, but also to build up the muscle mass in cattle. Could that have had the same effect on Miscavige? (Actually, asthma medications often use corticosteroids, which do not have the same effect as the anabolic steroids that weightlifters and athletes employ. Corticosteroids can stunt growth, however, and if Miscavige took them might have contributed to his short stature.) Scott decided to write a Knowledge Report about what he had seen, which would go to the Ethics Officer. “Here is a Scientologist, and he’s taking drugs, and he’s having these very bad episodes of asthmatic attacks, that can and should be handled by auditing.” He also asked for David’s preclear folder, which should have a record of his previous auditing. He was told that David didn’t have a PC folder. Scott had never heard of a Scientologist without one.

Scott worked with David on some of his coursework and training drills. At times, the teenager struck him as highly intelligent, but robotic, and there were some concepts he couldn’t seem to grasp. For instance, with the most basic E-Meter drill, which was simply to touch the meter and then let go, Scott recalls that David’s hand was shaking. “David, relax! This is just a drill,” Scott said. David settled down, and they continued the drill, but Scott was troubled. The boy was supposed to be a qualified auditor but he didn’t seem to be trained at all. According to Scott, David admitted that he had never audited anyone and that, in fact, he had never even been audited himself. “Auditing is for weaklings,” he said. In any case, he said, he was Clear from a past life. Scott wrote up another Knowledge Report.

The course supervisor was strangely impatient with Scott for taking extra time to get Dave through the drills. There was something else that was peculiar, too. A photographer kept following David around. Later, Scott learned that a Scientology magazine was preparing an article about the youngest auditor to complete an internship in the Sea Org. Scott was complicating matters by holding up David’s progress.

Scott remembers that on Monday, David audited a preclear. When he came back to the room, he seemed agitated, and Scott asked him what was going on. “Those f*cking women!” Scott remembers David exclaiming. “There should be no women in the Sea Org.” Scott learned that there were three women who were overseeing David’s internship at Saint Hill. David’s attitude toward women was deeply troubling, as Scott noted in yet another Knowledge Report. So far, no one in the Ethics Office had responded.

That changed a few days later. Scott was called into the Ethics Office and told that David had complained that Scott was enturbulating, or upsetting, him and causing problems because of the abundant reports he was writing. “This kid is an SP,” Scott warned, “and you better handle him.” Then he opened the door to leave. David was standing just outside. His reaction told Scott that he had overheard him calling him a Suppressive Person. “He went into total fear,” Scott said. That very day, David was moved into another room, and his parents soon returned from the United States. But David avoided Scott whenever they passed each other.

In August, Scott was sitting out in the yard across from the castle and the auditing rooms on the Saint Hill grounds. He was talking to a friend of his, a Norwegian nurse. Suddenly they heard a young woman wailing. Scott remembers looking up and seeing David, his face red and the veins visible in his forehead. He had a preclear folder under his arm. Behind him was the crying girl, who was holding her side in apparent pain. According to Scott the nurse exclaimed, “He beat up his PC!”