The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (31 page)

A few miles further east John Travolta thunk-thunk-thunked along a red carpet on a Harley-Davison. Over the thunk of the Harley, you can clearly hear a man, hoarse but unusually loud, roaring from the back of the crowd: ‘Mr Travolta, are you a member of a sinister, mind control cult?’ This was the premiere of Travolta’s movie,
Wild Hogs
. A couple of police officers came over. They looked bemused, uncertain as what to do. They did nothing.

‘The allegation is that the leader, Miscavige, goes around thumping people…’

This lunatic would not shup up: ‘Mr Travolta… many of your fans think you’re wonderful but some people think your religion is a crazy, mind-control cult?’

I was that lunatic.

‘We love you John!’ shouted a lady in the crowd – that would be the other John, of course.

A security guard told me to move back. I carried on for a bit. A middle-aged lady with a Cockney accent, clearly a lifelong Travolta fan, had a gentle go at me. I told her that Travolta is, some say, in a brainwashing cult. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but he’s in a sexy man cult.’ To that, there was no answer. By the time that interchange was over, the film star had disappeared into his premiere.

The
Wild Hogs
premiere was not my finest hour. Behind the scenes, Travolta reportedly phoned the BBC’s Director-General – my boss five levels above my head – to complain about me; the Scientology footage of me yelling at him makes me look unhinged; and there was something clearly uncomfortable about the whole thing.

This is choppy water, where the piety of our celebrity-obsessed culture accords to showbiz deities and the proper scrutiny of the politics of ‘religion’ clash. On chat shows, in Britain or the United States, presented by people like witty, savvy insiders like Jonathon Ross, you never see celebrities like, say, Madonna, Tom Cruise or John Travolta being questioned, seriously, about the downsides of their beliefs in the Kabbalah Centre or the Church of Scientology. Critics may claim that there is some understanding, written or unwritten, that the chat host will not trespass into certain areas. That means that any ‘soft power’ celebrities may have, in terms of suggesting to their fans that their off-stage enthusiasms or beliefs are worth taking up, is not critically examined. Power without scrutiny is not good. The alternative is to try and challenge the celebrity when they are out in the open. The danger is that you end up looking foolish, which I did, very much so. Perhaps the greater danger, that the influence celebrities may hold over their fans goes unquestioned, slips by, unseen.

The following Saturday we went along to Tottenham Court Road to film the monthly anti-Church picket outside the Scientology recruiting centre. Even before we got to the picket, I spotted someone filming me surreptitiously, and gave chase. He ran away. As Mole, Bill and I turned the corner, the following scene presented itself: a small crowd of anti-Scientologists, standing on the opposite side of the road from the centre, making amusingly silly noises, a gaggle of police officers, a few police vehicles parked nearby and a Scientology TV crew, a man with a camera and a woman with one of those dead coypu sound boom thingies.

‘I presume you’re from Scientology because you’re dressed in black and you won’t tell me your names,’ I told them. Sherlock Holmes, eat your heart out.

They held their tongue. It was just like old times. We had missed them; they, seemingly, had missed us; we filmed them; they filmed us; we filmed them filming us; they filmed us filming them filming us…

Shawn Lonsdale would have loved it.

I crossed the road and started chatting to the picket. One woman with long red-hair as if from a pre-Raphaelite painting held a placard, saying: ‘Say no to Scientology’. Someone else was handing out leaflets, saying: ‘Scientology is evil.’ Another chap held a placard on a long stick, proclaiming: ‘WARNING: You are entering a cult recruitment zone’. From the placard dangled a space alien doll in cosmic grey.

The picket’s leaders, if such a chaotic group could have leaders, were John Ritson and Hartley Patterson. Hartley smiled on as John in his tell-tale, sing-song voice advised bewildered shoppers going up and down Tottenham Court Road: ‘Never give any money to Scientology. You don’t get better, you get worse. They find problems you never knew you had. It’s nonsense, it’s rubbish. …. People spend more than a million or more to go up the so-called bridge of total freedom. Bridge of total madness more likely.’

He paused, as a red London bus trundled past.

‘Just say no to Scientology. They’re a barmy cult who just want your money. It’s a rip off. It’s a scam. Never give any money to Scientology. They’re not growing, they’re shrinking.’

In another space-time continuum, I would like to introduce John, Hartley and chums to the denizens of the Celebrity Centre in LA.

Back in the real-world, I turned to our camera and said: ‘There’s a bloke here who’s rather rude about Scientology. He says…’

That’s as far as I got. Mole had spotted Mike Rinder. Mike and Bob ‘Fireman Bob’ Keenan crossed the road. Mike seemed quietly amused. Bob just looked hostile. I shook hands and battle renewed.

‘This is your demonstration that you’ve set up for today?’ asked Mike in his curious blend of Australian-American.

‘It’s not my demonstration. It’s got nothing to do with me’, I said.

‘How did you know they were here?’

‘We heard about it.’

‘It’s a little odd that you suddenly show up. Three people show up for a picket and you’re here?’ [To be fair, there seemed to be more than three protesters: say, four. More turned up later, maybe a dozen.]

‘So you didn’t know these guys were going to be here?’ asked Bob.

‘We did know because we’re making a film about Scientology.’

‘So you told them to come?’

‘No we didn’t. That’s not right Bob. We knew about the protest.’

‘Because they got in contact with you?’

‘Where’s Tommy Davis?’ I asked, changing the subject, subtly. ‘He’s dropped off the emails. Where’s Tommy?’

They didn’t like that. It was just getting going properly when a policeman interrupted: ‘You haven’t got authority to film here, you are causing a big congestion here.’

He was genial, not officious. The policeman suggested we conduct our interview somewhere else. ‘It’s not an interview, it’s a row,’ I said.

The Church’s agents beat a retreat back across the road to the centre. We followed them, me calling out: ‘Where’s Tommy Davis? Is he in the RPF?’

‘No,’ said Mike.

‘Well, where’s Tommy? Has he been knocked off?’ We assembled by the door of the recruiting centre: Mike and Bob on the threshold, their camera crew close by, me and Mole and Bill on the outside, three police officers swimming around, like goldfish enjoying a trip around their bowl.

‘Now we’d really like to interview Mr Miscavige about these allegations that he’s been thumping people? So the question is, has David Miscavige thumped anyone? Can we interview David Miscavige?’

Mike turned his back on me, and Bob said: ‘You’re blocking our door.’

‘I take it that’s a “no”, Sir,’ said the police officer, ever the diplomat, and we walked across the road. In the meantime, Janet Laveau and the ginger-haired Graham Wilson arrived to hear John Ritson of the picket loud-hail how one Scientologist who had fallen out with David Miscavige had ‘been put in the RPF, their internal prison system. It’s a barmy UFO cult – don’t give money to Scientology.’

I re-crossed Tottenham Court Road and challenged Mike for old time’s sake: ‘Just one last question. We’ve heard from a witness who says that he’s personally seen David Miscavige hit you and knock you to the ground.’

Mike launched at me, aggressive, furious, the most animated I had ever seen him: ‘John, if you come up with that crap again, I will file a complaint against you. Those allegations are absolute utter rubbish, absolute utter rubbish. Not true, rubbish.’

I pressed him.

‘It’s a lie.’

That wasn’t, as it happened, his last word on the subject.

That day the weird courier asked my neighbour where I lived. That evening Tomiko, my fiancée, my oldest friend, Jonathan Gebbie, his mother, Audrey Gebbie, and I were having dinner in a restaurant in Earlsfield when we noticed that a stranger was sat close to us and paying over-due attention to our conversation. I challenged him to reveal his identity: he refused. I challenged him to deny categorically that he had anything to do with Scientology. He declined, and said that I was invading his privacy. When I asked him who had been talking to my neighbour today, he said nothing but looked embarrassed.

Shortly before our wedding day day, a stranger, a woman, had knocked on the door of Tomiko’s mother’s flat in Totnes. T’s sister, Rhi, answered the door and the stranger who said she was from Dawlish – a coastal town in Devon – implied that she knew us well and knew that we were getting married but wasn’t quite sure where. Rhi told her about the fort.

Tomiko and I got married in the Cornish fort in late April. It was a stunning day: blue clear skies, an absurdly happy party, with a pig on a stick and buckets of alcohol, preceded by an open air ceremony conducted by Jonathan, who just happens to be not only a rocket scientist who worked on Beagle II’s trip to the Red Planet – a top secret success that initiated first contact with the Martians, covered up as a great British disaster – but also a lay Anglican to boot. The Church of Scientology – or maybe someone connected with them – came too. The iconic picture of our wedding day is of the bride and groom looking grave after my son, Sam, and his mate Tom Reeves spotted somebody hiding in the shrubbery and taking pictures. Sam, Tom and my BBC colleague Patrick Barrie gave chase but whoever it was got away. I have to say it helped being inside a massive Napoleonic era fort surrounded by enough food and wine to feed an army. We kept calm and carried on.

Back at the BBC’s Current Affairs department, in White City, Team Panorama struggled to cope with a torrent of letters from the Church’s lawyers, American and British. The Church seemed to be making most use of those awfully nice people at Carter-Ruck.

By this time, our group paranoia was comical. When we held meetings, we would take the batteries and SIM cards out of mobile phones and leave them and walk to a meeting room 50 feet away from where we had left our little silicone puddles of micro-electronic wizardry. We were determined that they would not find out who we were going to talk to. We wanted to tell one story of how the Church impacted on the life of a British family. Our research team, Patrick Barrie and Uli Hesse, found a mother who lived three hours train ride from London. We hopped on the train and crossed England to see her.

You know what happens next. ‘Betty’ gave us a very moving interview about how her daughter, ‘Sam’, had disconnected from her. Before we got back to the office, ‘Sam’ walked through her door for the first time in two years and the next day asked her mum to kill the interview with Panorama.

The Church being the Church, it wasn’t difficult to find another family that had been split by them. We interviewed Sharon in North London, bereft that her daughter had joined the Church and later disconnected from her.

On May 3
, a couple of weeks before transmission, Mike Rinder arrived in the BBC lobby to talk face-to-face to BBC executives. This was viewed as a deliberate attempt to put pressure on our journalism, and Mike and the Church of Scientology was left unseen. But not, thanks to Carter-Ruck, etc, unheard or unrepresented.

Behind the scenes we were editing and re-editing. After a lot of argy-bargy, we pulled the allegations that Miscavige went around thumping people. In 2007 we had only one on-screen interview from Bruce Hines in which an ex-Scientologist alleged that he had been hit by the Leader. British libel law is, some say, a rich man’s game which places the burden of proof on the publisher. Many newspapers were critical of the then leading judge on the libel bench, Mr Justice Eady, who had, fairly or unfairly, developed a reputation for favouring rich plaintiffs over cash-strapped newspapers and broadcasters.

A tsunami of letters from smart, expensive lawyers like Carter-Ruck in London and others in LA were coming in, attacking this and that aspect of the programme. Celebrities who I had interviewed in LA now claimed that I had invaded their privacy and refused consent for the interviews to be shown, even though they had sat down in a room in the Celebrity Centre in front of me and the BBC’s cameras. In the programme we addressed that concern by showing the celebrities but paraphrasing their views and, when I asked about Xenu, hearing Tommy voice his incredulity. The cumulative effect of the attacks from the Church’s lawyers was to bring most of us to a state close to mental and moral exhaustion. The hardest thing for me was that any internal argument I made in favour of x or y was enfeebled by my ‘exploding tomato’ impression. The team swung behind me, carrying me across the finishing line.

On the Saturday before our Panorama, ‘Scientology & Me’, was due to air, the Church’s John Alex Wood put up a 41-second clip of me losing it in ‘The Industry of Death’ on YouTube. The calls from the Sunday newspapers piled in, and Panorama editor Sandy Smith and I fielded them. We told all of them I had been in the wrong to lose control and I used the phrase ‘exploding tomato’ to describe my hapless interviewing technique. If the newspapers thought that we were going to cover up my loss of temper, they were wrong. But we also said there were things in the programme about the Church that would give the viewer context and grounds for concern. We released an equally short clip of Tommy Davis going nose-to-nose with me at Plant City, when he lectured me about America’s freedom of religion and then trotted off when I started talking about freedom of speech. But, by and large, the story in everybody’s minds was me losing it, and that’s what the papers ran with.

It was an interesting experience being rubbished 24/7 around the world for three days. My son Sam was at the gym, on a double treadmill machine, with a pal, both of them watching the BBC News Channel when the exploding tomato popped up. ‘Look at that nutter losing it,’ said Sam’s pal.