Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(87)

Rathbun directed the ferocious legal assault on Time and oversaw the team of private detectives probing into Behar’s private life. The church, employing what was reported to be an annual litigation budget of $20 million and a team of more than a hundred lawyers to handle the suits already in the courts, filed a $416 million libel action against Time Warner, the parent company of the magazine, and Behar. Because the church is regarded under American law as a “public figure,” Scientology’s lawyers had to prove not only that the magazine’s allegations were wrong but also that Behar acted with “actual malice”—a legal term meaning that he knowingly published information he knew to be false, or that he recklessly disregarded the facts, because he intended to damage the church. Although there was no convincing evidence proving that the facts were wrong or that the reporter was biased, the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which sustained the district court’s initial ruling against the church. In the process, it cost Time more money in defense costs than any other case in its history.

Rathbun’s strategy followed Hubbard’s dictate that the purpose of a lawsuit is “to harass and discourage rather than win.” Hubbard also wrote: “If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace.… Don’t ever defend. Always attack.” He added: “NEVER agree to an investigation of Scientology. ONLY agree to an investigation of the attackers.” He advised Scientologists: “Start feeding lurid, blood, sex, crime, actual evidence on the attackers to the press.… Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.… There has never yet been an attacker who was not reeking with crime. All we had to do was look for it and murder would come out.” These were maxims that Rathbun took as his guidelines.

The Time article capsized Miscavige’s attempts to break free of the negative associations so many people had with Scientology. But there was an even larger battle under way, one in which the church’s very existence was at stake: its fight with the IRS to regain its tax-exempt status as a bona fide religion, which it had lost in 1967.

The government’s stance was that the Church of Scientology was in fact a commercial enterprise, with “virtually incomprehensible financial procedures” and a “scripturally based hostility to taxation.” The IRS had ruled that the church was largely operated to benefit its founder. Miscavige inherited some of that liability when he took over after Hubbard’s death. A tax exemption would not only put the imprimatur of the American government on the church as a certified religion, rather than a corrupt, profit-making concern, but it would also provide a substantial amount of immunity from civil suits and the persistent federal criminal investigations. A decision against the tax exemption, on the other hand, would destroy the entire enterprise, because Hubbard had decided in 1973 that the church should not pay its back taxes. Twenty years later, the church was $1 billion in arrears, with only $125 million in reserves. The founder had placed Scientology’s head on the executioner’s block.

The war between the church and the IRS had already gone on for more than two decades, with both sides waging a campaign of intimidation and espionage. Miscavige accused the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS of engaging in surveillance of church leaders, wiretaps, and illegal opening of the church’s mail. Now the church upped the ante by besieging the IRS with 200 lawsuits on the part of the church and more than 2,300 suits on behalf of individual parishioners in every jurisdiction in the country, overwhelming government lawyers, running up fantastic expenses, and causing an immense amount of havoc inside the IRS. Miscavige boasted that the entire legal budget of the federal agency was exhausted: “They didn’t even have money to attend the annual American Bar Association conference of lawyers—which they were supposed to speak at!” The church ran ads against the agency, using the images of beloved celebrities (who were not Scientologists) such as John Wayne and Willie Nelson, who had been audited by the IRS. “All of America Loved Lucy,” one ad said, over an iconic photo of Lucille Ball, “except the IRS.” A ten-thousand-dollar reward was offered to potential whistle-blowers to expose IRS abuses. Private investigators dug into the private lives of IRS officials, going so far as to attend seminars and pose as IRS workers, to see who had a drinking problem or might be cheating on a spouse. Stories based on these investigations were promoted by a phony news bureau the church established, and also published in the church’s Freedom magazine, which Scientologists passed out for free on the steps of the IRS headquarters in Washington. The hatred on both sides for the other was intense. It seemed bizarre that a rather small organization could overmatch the US government, but the harassment campaign was having an effect. Some government workers were getting anonymous calls in the middle of the night, or finding that their pets had disappeared. Whether or not these events were part of the Scientology onslaught, they added to the paranoia many in the agency were feeling.

Both the church and the IRS faced the challenge of addressing the question of what, exactly, constituted a religion in the eyes of the American government. On the church’s side was a body of scholars who had arisen in defense of what were called “new religious movements,” such as the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and of course the Church of Scientology. The term was employed to replace the word “cult,” because these academics found no reliable way of distinguishing a cult from a religion. They believe that new religious movements are persecuted and ridiculed simply because they are recent and seem exotic. Often, such experts are paid to testify in court on behalf of these organizations. In the courtroom setting, the casual distinctions that many people often make about cults and brainwashing have proven to be difficult to sustain, as the experts pose telling comparisons with the history of mainstream religions, whose practices and rituals have long since been folded into a broad cultural acceptance.