Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(68)
Brousseau said that was the general idea.
“I can’t stand it!” Brousseau remembers Miscavige saying. “I feel like jumping in and grabbing a fish with my f*cking hands! Or cramming the hook down their f*cking throats!”
That was the end of the fishing trip.
After Quentin’s suicide and Mary Sue’s prison sentence, the remainder of Hubbard’s family broke apart. His oldest daughter, Diana, had been Hubbard’s main supporter. She and her husband, Jonathan Horwich, lived at Flag Base in the Fort Harrison penthouse in Clearwater, with their daughter, Roanne. As her father became increasingly remote, Diana decided to try her luck as a singer and songwriter. She released a soft-jazz album titled LifeTimes in 1979, using notable Scientologist musicians, including Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke, as backup. The cover features her in a black dress, lips parted, arms crossed, her pale shoulders hunched, and her waist-length red hair stirring in the breeze.
Although the album received little notice, Diana decided to leave her husband, and the Sea Org, and marry John Ryan, a public Scientologist who had produced her record. She moved to Los Angeles to dedicate herself to music. Horwich agreed to the divorce, but he refused to part with Roanne, who was two years old at the time. Hubbard strongly supported this decision, but Mary Sue was opposed. She wanted her granddaughter to be nearby, and she began agitating for Diana to gain custody.
Several missions were sent to bargain with Diana, but she was unmoved. Finally, Jesse Prince got the assignment. “It was a do or die mission,” he recalled. If he didn’t succeed in gaining clear custody of Roanne for Horwich, he would be sent back to the RPF. For whatever reason, Diana signed the release he put in front of her. Hubbard was thrilled. He rewarded Prince with a leather coat, a gold chain, some cash, and an M14 assault rifle.
Suzette, Diana’s younger sister, was increasingly disaffected. Quentin’s death had been a blow, but the fact that there had been no ceremony afterward—his name was essentially erased from family history—left her embittered and wary. She longed for the warmth of her Saint Hill childhood, when her mother would read to her and her father would laugh and toss her in the air. Those days were long gone. The forces pulling her family apart were far too powerful for her to resist. She wanted nothing more than to walk away and start a family of her own. But that was not so easily done. She had tried to elope with another Sea Org member she had met years before, in Washington. “We had fallen in love and wanted to get married and live together for the rest of our lives,” her suitor, Arnaldo Lerma, later said. He flew to Clearwater; they got blood tests and a marriage license. Suzette then confessed the plan in an auditing session. “She spilled the beans and I got arrested—well, detained,” Lerma said. “I remember being in a room with a chair and a light bulb and two guys outside the door. I was interrogated for several hours. I was not struck, hit, or physically abused. However, what I do remember is the deal I was offered: ‘We will give you a guarantee of safe passage out of the state of Florida with all body parts attached if you tell Suzette Hubbard the marriage is off.’ ” Lerma did as he was told, leaving the church as well. Later, when Hubbard learned about another man Suzette was interested in, he paid him to leave her alone. She was isolated and desperately lonely.
She did finally get married to a Scientologist named Michael Titmus, in 1980, when she was twenty-five, but her father didn’t trust him either. Titmus was sent to RPF and denounced as an infiltrator. Suzette was told to divorce him, which she did; soon after that, she was transferred to Gold Base to work in the Household Unit, cleaning rooms and doing the laundry—for David Miscavige, among others.
IN 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion, the church faced two of its most difficult court challenges. In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim, sought $25 million for emotional distress caused by “brainwashing” and emotional abuse. He said he had been forced to disconnect from his family and locked for eighteen hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, California, deprived of sleep, and fed only once a day. After attaining OT III status, Wollersheim said, his “core sense of identity” had been shattered. “At OT III, you find out you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent,” he later recalled. “I went psychotic on OT III. I lost a sense of who I was.”
In order to substantiate the charges, Wollersheim’s attorney introduced Scientology’s most confidential materials—including the OT III secrets—as evidence. At this point, those materials were still unknown to the general public. The loss of Scientology’s chest of secrets was not just a violation of the sanctity of its esoteric doctrines; from the church’s perspective, open examination of these materials represented a copyright infringement and a potential business catastrophe. Those who were traveling up the Bridge would now know their destination. The fog of mystery would be dissipated.
The Wollersheim suit had been filed in 1980, but Scientology lawyers had been frantically dragging it out with writs and motions. An undercover campaign was launched to discredit or blackmail Wollersheim’s lawyer, Charles O’Reilly. His house was bugged and his office was infiltrated by a Scientology operative. There was an attempt to trap him or his bodyguards in a compromising situation with women. The church also harassed the judge in the case, Ronald Swearinger. “I was followed,” the judge later said. “My car tires were slashed. My collie drowned in my pool.” A former Scientology executive, Vicki Aznaran, later testified that there was an effort to compromise the judge by setting up his son, who they heard was gay, with a minor boy.