The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (10 page)

As I said at the start, none of the people who had been Scientologists were dumb. Bruce was a big man, still handsome, plainly massively intelligent but gentle and thoughtful, understated and modest.

We drove around San Francisco for a bit, admiring the pointy building which looks like a bishop’s hat, and bumping into a George W. Bush cavalcade. We found a great background shot of San Francisco which framed the whole interview. The weather was ceaselessly sunny. It was weird listening to a man’s story of being held in a prison of the mind against the back-drop of one of the most free-thinking, free-wheeling cities on the planet.

Is it a cult?

‘It is a cult. I would have violently disagreed with that, even five years ago.’

Bruce referred to the 1961 book by the American psychiatrist, Robert Lifton:
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China
, which I wrote about briefly in Chapter One. I’ve only got my head round Lifton’s work while writing this book. Now I sleep with it under my pillow.

Lifton was one of the very first people to think hard about brainwashing, and his understanding grew over time. Later on, Lifton set out three simple definers for a cult in his foreword to Margaret Singer’s book,
Cults In Our Midst
: that it has a charismatic leader who becomes a god; that it brainwashes; that it causes harm.

On Lifton’s first definer, I think a reasonable person would say that if a ‘religious’ body allowed its Leader to abuse or even hit members of the Holy Order, repeatedly, with impunity, that would be close to treating them as a god.

‘Most people, even Sea Organisation members and public Scientologists, have no idea what David Miscavige is like behind closed doors,’ said Bruce. ‘They have only seen him in these public gatherings, and there he’s quite personable.’

The real Miscavige is rather different than the fluent man in the tuxedo, said Bruce, accusing him of being a ‘very angry individual, he’s violent’.

Bruce explained that in 1995 he had audited the wife of a senior Scientologist, and Miscavige was not happy with the results. The woman was in LA, but the husband was posted 90 miles away at the International Headquarters of the Church, often known as Int or Gold Base, 500 acres tucked away in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Californian desert near a one-horse town called Hemet. Back in the day, in the late seventies, when Mr Hubbard was on the run from the FBI, Gold was top secret and for decades the Church sought to hide its existence from ‘public’ Scientologists. Today you can find it on Google Earth, snuggling the brown foothills of the San Jacinto mountains at Gilman Hot Springs, California. More than Clearwater or its complex in downtown LA, Gold is the headquarters of the Church, where David Miscavige is based. Bruce’s task was to convince the unhappy wife through auditing that her objections to this 90-mile separation were misplaced. Unsurprisingly, he failed.

‘I was in my office at Gold and I just heard out in the hallway, just outside my office, I heard him shouting, “where is that motherfucker?” and I go “uh-oh”. He barged into my office, and he’s always followed around by four, five, six people and they follow him in. And then he said, “there he is!” but he’s talking more loudly than I am and with much more anger. He walked up and he swung and he hit me on the side of the head.’

To say the head of a religion, or, to be more exact, an organisation that claims to be a religion, goes round hitting people is a heavy accusation. Critically, the sources have to be credible and there has to more than one and this isn’t the first time that someone has alleged that David Miscavige is violent. Back in 1987, Panorama reporter John Penycate interviewed Donald Larson, an ex-Scientologist who was described as being in the former ‘financial police’ of the Church. Larson told Panorama: ‘It was my job to scare people.’ What methods did you use? ‘Extortion, force, threats, duress.’ Larson described how, once Miscavige had taken over as leader of the Church, 15 Scientologists drove in three hired limos to the San Francisco Org to confront the head of the organization there. ‘This is nothing to do with religion any more,’ said Larson, ‘this is “where’s the money, Jack? I want the money. Where did you put the money?” The guy goes “I don’t have the money. I don’t know”. So David Miscavige comes up, grabs him by the tie and starts bashing him on the filing cabinets. Then his tie is ripped off and he’s thrown out onto the street.’

Ex-Scientologist Tom DeVocht used to be Miscavige’s drinking buddy. The two men used to chew the fat over a bottle of Macallan’s 12-year-old malt in the Chairman’s den at Gold from around 2000 to 2005 when Tom got out. Tom is a builder by trade, a thoughtful and decent man, good company, and, I felt, a man who would be a good friend. He was so close to Dave that he became a car-shopper for him, picking out an Acura TL, a fancy Japanese model. Women readers may not quite get this, but for a man to franchise out the buying of a car to another man is no small thing.

Miscavige hit him twice, Tom told me in 2010.

‘The first one, I was down at Gold, working on the renovations of compact disc manufacture and plant, and the next thing I knew all the international management, what they call “The Hall”, had come running down from a good quarter of a mile away. Dave had come in and he’d called me and I was standing in front of everybody and I really can’t recall exactly what he asked me. But I remember hesitating and thinking, what did he mean by that? The next thing I know, with an open hand, I got slapped, popped my ear pretty good. And pushed down to the ground and I think he might have hit me one more time in the chest.’

You are bigger than him?

‘I would say most are, but yes I am bigger than him.’

If somebody hit me…

‘…I was tempted to hit him back. This is where the cult aspect of it comes in. Here I have got the pope hitting me and I am thinking I have got 50-80 people behind him that I knew if I did anything to him, they would jump on me. I was outnumbered for sure. But that aside, you really do get into a mental state of…’ Tom struggled to find the right words, ‘…you have got to understand for years these people up there have been hit. I’ve seen Dave hit people, 75 to a 100 times. No joke.’

‘Second time,’ – also at Gold – ‘I was in the big castle, the studio. He was walking down the hall and I was there doing something, I forget. He walked by me and he just pushed me and banged my head into the concrete wall and he just kept walking.’

These are allegations that the Church of Scientology denies, I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Tom. And then he laughed.

These
are
allegations that the Church of Scientology denies.

Close up, Tom observed the slow accretion of power to Miscavige, how he switched from being on equal terms with other executives in the Church, when he addressed them by the first names and they called him Dave, to him insisting on them calling him ‘Sir’. In the end, Tom said, Miscavige became, ‘quite a monster, hitting people.’

Miscavige’s abuse of his Holy Order’s most senior figures was, at times, like a sadistic cocktail of the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty, according to Tom’s description of it. Tom referred to a notorious game of ‘Musical Chairs’, the Scientology version, staged by Miscavige at Gold. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody blared out. Too many believers, not enough chairs. The twist is: if you lose your chair, you face eternal damnation. So you have to win that chair. Musical chairs as directed by the thumping pope. Tom said: ‘Everybody played the musical chairs game but with this mental anguish. And people were breaking down. It was unbelievable, a very eerie, strange thing.’

Like Bruce, Tom found the real Chairman to be unlike his official persona: ‘Up front Miscavige is a very nice guy when you first meet him. You think, “Wow!” This is a genuinely nice guy, he cares about me, he cares about other people, this is what you would expect from the head of the Church of Scientology. The closer I got with him, I found out he is actually quite the opposite. That is all a facade. He is an evil person.’

Evil is a heavy word, I said.

‘It is, and I am not using it lightly.’

The Church and David Miscavige deny allegations of abuse and violence in the strongest possible terms.

The Church’s official organ, Freedom Magazine, is not uncritical of Tom. It says that he is ‘a genuine pathological liar’; an incompetent who ‘enlisted a convicted felon to broker a Church property acquisition’, whose construction work for the Church led to ‘cost overruns, blown budgets and inordinate project delays’; it alleges that he stole several hundred dollars from the purse of his wife’s grandmother on their wedding day. It says that his ex-wife never saw any bruises on him: ‘DeVocht’s former wife, Jenny Linson: “I slept with Tom DeVocht for almost 20 years. I knew every inch of him. I never saw one scratch. I never saw one bruise. I never saw one black eye, nothing.”’

We come across Jenny Linson later in our narrative.

Freedom Magazine goes on to quote Tom denying that he had ever claimed that he had been bruised. The magazine adds: ‘DeVocht was so slow on the uptake he missed the logic train, i.e., that he
claimed
to have bruises or scars was not the point of his wife’s refutation; it was that someone who was actually beaten would have obviously
exhibited
bruises and scars. Or to phrase it in terms of his own skewed thinking: it doesn’t matter whether physical evidence “sort of” exists to prove what he’s saying because he never claimed there was physical evidence in the first place. But, of course, if there is no physical evidence, doesn’t that mean his allegations are “sort of” false, which in turn means DeVocht is “sort of” lying?’

Note the idiosyncratic, even peculiar, style of that rebuttal: pure denigration.

Claire Headley was born into the Church and signed the billion-year contract to join the Sea Org when she was still a teenager. She rose to work at the very top of the organisation at Gold base. Her recollection of Miscavige is not wholly favourable. Once, he ordered her, ‘go and berate those people and say: “Suck my big fat cock.”’

She is a beautiful woman, of poise and quality, the mother of two adored children, born in England, with a trace of her English accent still. Claire does not have a cock.

Did you do that?

‘I did.’

Forgive me, I said, but that sounds crazy.

‘It is.’

Her husband Marc joined in. Marc is a thick-set chap, a tekkie, self-assured, funny with a fast wit. You would not want to get on the wrong side of him, but he struck me as being a good man.

Marc tried to give me a flavour of how Scientology’s pope thinks of himself: Miscavige ‘went to some big celebrity dinner with Tom Cruise and John Travolta and a bunch of people and Bill Clinton was there and they shook hands or they talked or whatever, and when he got back to Gold someone said: “I heard you met President Bill Clinton”, and he said: “No, Bill Clinton met me.”’

Had Miscavige ever abused people in their presence?

Marc said: ‘I’ve seen him beat many people up.’ Claire said she had too. Marc had been beaten up by him once, too: ‘I was in a production facility and I had made an offhand comment and he was already upset and he grabbed me and started punching me and I fell up against a wall unit like a shelf, desk type of thing and my glasses were broken. I was going to strike him back and I was escorted out of the building immediately.’

Marc has written a book on his time in the Church,
Blown For Good
, which is a shocking read. The book describes Miscavige’s mass humiliation of the Sea Org staff: his version of Musical Chairs with people ripping chairs away from rivals and, on another occasion, when around a hundred of the Holy Order of the Church were made to clean out the sewage ponds at Gold by hand. Marc writes: ‘As you picked up the waste, it would crumble in your hands and make dust. Multiply that times a hundred people, walking, handling and moving all that waste and that made a pretty big cloud… A giant cloud of dust made up of excrement was what I was breathing in.’ The ordeal lasted two days. Eventually, Marc was allowed a shower. ‘That night when I got to wash up, I took a two-hour shower to try and get the stench off me. It did not work. I think it took a week for all of the crap to work its way out of my pores, nose, throat, and ears. Even my eyes would tear crap mud. It was the most disgusting, humiliating experience of my entire life.’

One wonders at the mental state of anyone who allows himself to scrub clean a sewage pond thick with excrement crumble by hand in the service of what some say is a religion. If Marc is right, one hundred people did that.

The Church and David Miscavige deny the allegations of abuse and violence and describe the Headleys as members of a ‘Posse of Lunatics’. The Church’s Freedom magazine says that Marc is ‘a fervid anti-Scientologist who never misses an opportunity to publicly denigrate the religion and its Founder.’ It says he was about to be caught red-handed after teaming up with a criminal in a crooked concern, so he fled. It says he was then excommunicated. His wife Claire soon followed suit, making her unannounced exit shortly thereafter. Later, it says, Marc became a member of a cyber-terrorist group.

I thought the Headleys were a lovely couple with two great kids.

Steve Hall, Scientology’s top scriptwriter until he left, described the following scene: ‘I was called up to “Building 50”. Everyone was made to sit in special chairs and told where to sit. It was about 15 or 20 people. Finally Miscavige came in and started walking up and down the aisles. Each chair was spaced out so he had plenty of room. No one knew what it was about, as per usual, but Miscavige was fuming, also as per usual. He glared at each person intently, then stopped in front of me. He shouted to the room that I was “out-ethics” but didn’t say why. This was also usual. But this time he made a special point of it. After staring at me he finally moved on, went down three more people then suddenly attacked Marc Yager [a senior figure in the Church] without warning, striking him repeatedly on both sides of the head. Yager tried to deflect some of the blows but was not very successful because Miscavige was standing over him while Yager was sitting. Yager fell out of his chair and was visibly shaken.