The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (8 page)

‘I am creepy?’ asked Tommy, incredulous.

‘As I said…’

‘I am strange and creepy?’ Tommy’s incredulity thickened like gravy after stirring.

‘You came to my hotel at midnight, that’s creepy.’

‘People who sit down with you and talk to you about my religious belief is something like…’

Ding-Ding, Round Nine.

‘But some people say,’ I said, ‘it is a sinister cult. Now L Ron Hubbard? Some people say he is a fantasist and a liar.’

This got to Tommy. ‘I would just like…I would just like to, and I hope somebody is shooting this, OK, good…’

We were heading for a video shoot-out in the OK Corral. I counted five cameras: Bill with his big camera, Mole with a second smaller one, just in case, and three separate Scientology cameras. I set out to list them: ‘To be fair, there is one camera from the BBC, one camera from your…’

‘Now you listen to me for a second,’ snapped Tommy, his anger rising by the second, his face etched with aggression, my face reflected in his dark glasses.

‘You have no right whatsoever to say what and what isn’t a religion. The constitution of the United States of America guarantees one’s right to practice and believe freely in this country. And the definition of religion is very clear, and it is not defined by John Sweeney. And for you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory, so offensive and so bigoted – and the reason you keep repeating it is because you wanted to get a reaction like you are getting right now. Well buddy, you got it, right here, right now. I am angry. Real angry.’

We were nose to nose. Had I puckered my lips I could have kissed him. He announced that we were done.

‘We are not done,’ I said. From the age of five to ten I lived in Manchester. While riled, my vowel sounds flatten. ‘We are not done,’ I repeated, as if an extra on
Coronation Street
, up for a fight with Tony Gordon.

‘If you use that term one more time about my religion…’

‘We are not done because…’

‘I can’t be responsible for my actions…’

‘Now my friend it is your turn to listen to me. I am a British subject, not an American citizen and in my country we have freedom of speech. We have a freedom to speak and we have exercised that freedom for centuries. And, if people say to me that they think your…what you claim to be a religion is in fact a cult, I have a right to report that. I have got a right to report that Tommy…’

He trotted away, past a road works thingy, and jogged across the main road. I lumbered after him, a rhinoceros picking up speed. He called me a bigot, four, five times. That bounced off the rhino’s hide. I was holding up, so far.

CHAPTER FOUR

One man against the crowd

T
hat afternoon we headed back to Scientology town – Clearwater – to meet one man who stood apart from L Ron’s crowd. He was a fruitcake, a loner, a weirdo and a brave man, all rolled into one. His name was Shawn Lonsdale. Originally from New England, Shawn had been in the US Navy and while still a youngish man he had settled in Clearwater. Years before, he’d been caught by the police having consenting sex with men. Later, at a local council meeting, he had clashed with a Scientologist and suddenly they were on his case.

People who don’t like Scientology leave Clearwater. For example, in the late nineties Patricia Greenway, the Vice President of the Totally Fun Company, an amusement park design firm, aired her reasons for the company quitting town: ‘The downtown area has taken on the look and feel of a military base. The presence of thousands of uniformed Scientologists and their “security police” swarming the downtown area is oppressive.’

Shawn was different. He stayed, and took them on, single-handed, and that is, by itself, strange. He got himself a video camera and spent weeks filming Scientologists for a slot on the local cable TV network.

‘
Cult Watch
’ – Shawn’s show – is cult cult viewing, beyond surreal. What you see is fuzzy, muddy video. The production  values are, in contrast to those of the Church, dire. The shots are wobbly, the focus soggy, the sound quality poor. But the content is weirdly gripping. You watch him filming them filming him, close-ups of his feet, then their camera, a big lens, a finger or two of the Scientology camera person, no sound apart from the whirr and odd click from the two cameras staring at each other, recording, recording, recording. This goes on for minute after minute after minute and every second that passes the tension notches up. There is no doubting Shawn’s dogged persistence, and the essential strangeness of what he was capturing. He got to film what we didn’t see when we went out filming with Donna and Mike: a robotic procession of white-shirted, dark tied young men and women marching from one Scientology base in downtown Clearwater to another, getting on and off buses. You see dozens and dozens of them. If they are studying to become Operating Thetans, they appear to be a very strange species of students. Everyone conforms. It is like watching not a student body but a hive. Creepy with a capital C.

We tracked Shawn down to a rented apartment in a fly-blown part of town, decorated, if that is the right word, with a collection of green space alien dolls featuring their signature over-large, ovaloid eyeballs. He was a fit, lean, wiry man, slow speaking. He had a twinkle in his voice. We drove him downtown some blocks looking for a good place to film the interview and found a great spot on the top of a municipal car park. Behind us we had a view of the Fort Harrison hotel, one of their major complexes. That meant they had a view of us, but we didn’t care.

When filming them, Shawn would stick up a cardboard sign on his white 1991 Oldsmobile: ‘OT I-VIII for free at xenu.net.’ That website tells the story of the space alien Satan for free. The Church might say that what Shawn did was blasphemous. Cynics might add that his sign could have cost the Church, if not millions, then several hundred thousand dollars, in lost fees, by short-circuiting the lengthy, step-by-step ascent to the state of grace where you can find out about the Emperor Ming The Merciless lookalike, Xenu. It should come as no surprise to realise that the Church did not like Shawn one little bit. Back in 2006, Ben Shaw, one of their spokesman, said: ‘He is crazy, utterly crazy. He has no redeeming value to anyone anywhere.’

One simple rule of TV journalism: be scrupulously fair to people who make life difficult for you; and with the people who are happy to help you, knock them over the head with a cricket bat, or, probably better, the verbal equivalent thereof. So my opening question to Shawn did not beat about the bush.

‘You are a social outcast, a menace, a fruitcake, a nutter. Why would Scientology make those kinds of suggestions about you?’

Pay attention to this question. It pops up later, a kind of a sonic boom boomerang.

‘The only thing I can fathom,’ replied Shawn, ‘is that it is their only hope of trying to embarrass me into stopping doing what I am doing. They try to paint you as crazy, as some sort of social outcast, if you will, so that nobody will listen to you, nobody will take you seriously. It is a common trend to do that.’

Shawn explained his methodology: ‘I wanted to get their take on us. And the only way to do that, since nobody would talk to me or nobody would respond to any of my requests for interviews, was to just go up and start filming them. Their events, where they were coming and going, halls or classes down town which is the only time the public sees them. And they took serious offence.’

How do they register that offence?

‘It is almost like they have a mind break. If there is something that they can’t handle effectively, something happens.’

Shawn explained that he had been filming on the street for three weeks solid when a member of the Church approached him. Shawn said he started yelling obscenities, yelling that he was Nazi, asking him why he didn’t go to the Baptist church and call them all a bunch of ‘n’ words or the Jewish Temple and call them all a bunch of xxxx. He pushed Shawn, who shoved him back, and they ended up scuffling. That was the extreme, said Shawn. ‘Usually, it is just pushing or trying to get to the camera to stop you from filming or cursing at you and verbally assaulting you.’

I asked him about the sign on his Oldsmobile.

‘Xenu.net is one of the websites which reveals a lot of their upper level doctrine, OT I-VIII [Operating Thetan, level 1 – 8] for free, which is their higher levels, which costs the majority of the money that you will find they charge within Scientology. And all those are on the internet for free. And those were on my car downtown. The various levels [that is, OTs of Scientology] would walk around across the campus down here and see that on the car and I was hoping that they would wonder why they were paying so much money for it when it is free on the internet.’

They say these are confidential scriptures.

‘If it is out, deal with it. We had to deal with the bible being out. Others had to deal with the Koran, the Torah, everything is out. I don’t know why you would not want somebody to read a religious scripture of yours especially if it had anything good to say in it.’

What had Scientology done to Shawn?

‘It is more or less what they haven’t done. I was followed continuously for two months, followed by private investigators, followed by several vehicles which I was later able to track back to Scientology owned vehicles. I was yelled at down town numerous times, threatened with death. Cursed at by children in the presence of their parents. I would have never thought that I could stumble upon a scene that was so dramatically absent of peace and goodwill. But then again that seems to be the modus operandi when it comes to doing something that the Church doesn’t like. They all band together and act that way towards you.’

What about work?

Shawn got a job in a real estate company but that did not last for long. ‘My boss was called down to Fort Harrison’ – the Church’s main complex in Clearwater – ‘by Pat Harney’ – the PR lady who had blocked me that very morning from going into the Plant City Org – ‘in an effort to try to get me to reveal my motives or stop what I was doing, piecing together footage for the television programme. And almost immediately after that our business went south. I was asked to leave, it was a financial impossibility for me to be there. After that I went to unemployment. There were several calls made saying that I was making money off the books when I wasn’t. It was anonymous phone call after anonymous phone call, to every place where I turned in an application, there was always somebody calling with a threat.’ He gave what he said was an example: ‘“I saw this gentleman in your business filling out an application, I know him to be a religious bigot. I will not shop there, my friends will not shop there if I find out that you have hired this individual…” I am a pervert or I am a criminal, something of that nature.’

Shawn said that when the anonymous caller was challenged, ‘there was never an answer, there was always a hang-up. And I don’t know too many business owners that want to deal with that type of thing. And when you haven’t been hired yet it is very easy to pass your application to the garbage bin. So…’

Because you are trouble?

‘Evidently.’

‘What happened to accommodation…’

I stopped stone dead.

An SUV had suddenly shot up onto the top level of the car park. The door opened and a man got out, in a natty suit, dark glasses, white shirt, black and white striped tie, followed by a cameraman, and started walking towards us. The eerily bright Clearwater light half-blinded me. It was like a scene from the film,
The Matrix
, when the Agents in their corporate suits close in on Neo. Not quite believing the evidence of my own eyes, I squinted…

‘…if I am right,’ I said, ‘that is Tommy Davis.’ The figure, followed by the cameraman, approached us. He was carrying a manila envelope.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Tommy, for it was he. ‘You must be Shawn.’

‘Mr Davis, I presume,’ said Shawn, ‘nice to meet you.’

‘Good to meet you. I just wanted to make sure that we are on record as far as this gentleman here’ – Tommy was speaking to me, but nodded to Shawn – ‘who you are with. I don’t know how frankly he has been with you, just be pretty public about it.’

Tommy opened his file and began reading: ‘In 1990 he was arrested for trespassing, exposure of sexual organs. Unnatural and lascivious act, possession of cannabis, possession of drug paraphernalia. The police report this is from, the undercover officer who he solicited stated: “The defendant exposed his penis to undercover officer, began to masturbate in view of the public. This occurred in a posted no trespassing area. Search of the defendant’s vehicle revealed a marijuana pipe and marijuana”. And then on 7th June 2000 he was also arrested for lewd and lascivious behaviour. He was caught by a Pinellas County sheriff performing sex on another male in a public area.’

Throughout my battles with Tommy he spoke like an American lawyer addressing a grand jury, or, to be less kind, like Hollywood’s idea of a lawyer addressing a grand jury. This was Tommy’s moment in pseudo-court, the moment he nailed a credulous BBC reporter being taken in by a sexual monster. Game, set and match to the Church of Scientology? Not quite.

‘Now would Scientology,’ asked Shawn, ‘be able to help me with any of these problems that I supposedly have?’ There was something rather cool about Shawn’s sardonic tone with Tommy.

‘Now what he does,’ Tommy continued, as if Shawn had not spoken, almost as if he was of no significance, ‘he does speak about this openly and of course…’

‘By the way he is not an animal,’ I said. Enough already. ‘Answer that question, can’t you?’

‘I just want to make sure that we document this and I would be happy to speak to him,’ said Tommy, matter-of-factly.

‘Hold on a second… actually Tommy…. No…’ I stumbled to get my words out. I am an old-fashioned reporter and I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my time, but even so I was knocked off kilter by Tommy crashing our interview. I couldn’t quite believe it was happening.