The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (9 page)

‘I am making no comment…’ said Tommy.

‘Wait a second Tommy, I am interviewing the man.’ I turned to Shawn. I had read the article about him in the St Petersburg Times – the local paper that covers Clearwater – in which it mentioned Scientology’s demonizing him over his sexual past, that he had been caught by police officers having consensual sex with adult males in a public place several years ago. ‘Let me ask that question, excuse me is that true?’

‘Actually some of it wasn’t,’ said Shawn, ‘I can go back over it.’

‘I have the police reports here so…’ offered Tommy, helpfully. Or, perhaps, mock-helpfully.

‘What page are you reading from?’

At that moment our tape ran out. I was momentarily a bit cross with Bill, for being so unprofessional, blah blah, then I remembered that we had been running for hours, and that the tapes of even the very best BBC cameramen in the whole world occasionally run out.

When the fresh tape was in the camera, Shawn was questioning Scientology’s file on him. They’d doctored the file, it seemed. ‘Marijuana pipe and marijuana?’ Shawn was querying Tommy’s ‘police report’.

‘But I don’t see that on a charge sheet any more. That is not a charge.’

‘But this is the police report…’ replied Tommy, defensively.

‘So you have created a summary from a police report of your own,’ said Shawn. ‘You haven’t used the summary that…’

‘This is a report the Tampa police department…’ Tommy started.

Shawn interrupted: ‘…You’ve compiled this first charge sheet and a sheet from the county. Let’s say…’

‘Yes, from the…’

‘So you have taken it upon yourself…’

‘See this, this is a Tampa police report.’

‘So you have taken it upon yourself to…’

‘Yeah to summarise within the police report,’ said Tommy.

‘Why wouldn’t you use the police report summary?’ asked Shawn.

‘Last time I checked a marijuana pipe was there…’

‘Why wouldn’t you use the police report summary?’

‘OK fine, whatever,’ said Tommy, conceding the point of fact to Shawn. I smiled, inwardly.

Is it possible, I asked, that the reason why the Church raises this stuff is because he is a critic?

‘We want to make sure that it is on record that you know who it is that you are speaking about,’ said Tommy.

Yes I know, I was aware of that, I said.

‘He has never been a Scientologist. He has never done services,’ said Tommy.

He is a critic, I said.

‘He admitted in the St Petersburg Times that he conducted sexual acts on other people when he was low on money,’ said Tommy.

‘So I admitted that on national news,’ said Shawn, ‘and in one of our local papers.’

‘But I am asking are you aware of that?’ asked Tommy.

I said I was. ‘But Tommy,’ I pointed out, ‘just because you have come here and tracked us down again does not give you the right to dictate the conversation… You have invaded our interview.’

‘Actually,’ said Tommy with logic as round as a billiard ball, ‘you turned the cameras on me and started attacking me. I actually didn’t say anything.’

This was madness. You can’t physically invade a television interview, read out a factually incorrect version of someone’s criminal record for minor sex crimes from years ago and then proclaim with wounded innocence: ‘I actually didn’t say anything.’

Tommy and Shawn battled on while I wrestled with the surreal nature of what was happening. Eventually, I think I sorted it out inside my head and then the words came tumbling out. I have never in my life come across such a distortion of meaning, such a twisting of the English language.

‘Tommy, hold on a second. I can talk to whoever I so choose to in a free society.

That is why you invade, that’s why the creepy car comes. As far as the Church of Scientology is concerned, I can talk to anybody about you so long as they are not critical of Scientology. But the moment they are, then it seems as though it is very important for you to tell me that they are either an extortionist [Donna] or a sexual pervert [Shawn].’

‘No,’ said Tommy, ‘it is very important that you have the truth. And it is actually in the BBC broadcast guidelines, the codes of conduct, OfCom, in terms of first hand reports, in terms of balanced reporting, it is covered in your own guidelines. And there is actually something…’

‘I read them every night before I go to bed,’ I said.

Tommy repeated the gist of what he had just said. I asked him for a copy of their file on Shawn. He would not give it to me. Now it felt like my turn to make things a little more surreal.

Where are we going tomorrow? I asked.

‘I don’t know where are you going tomorrow.’

Well, you will find us I am sure, I said.

‘Yeah, we probably will.’ He made his point again that the BBC’s guidelines required fairness.

‘Last time I read the BBC guidelines there was nothing in it that said that every single interviewee had to be vetted by the Church of Scientology before we could speak to them.’

‘I actually don’t believe that I ever used the word vetted or what I describe as vetted,’ said Tommy. ‘I said you tell me who it is and I will send you the information on the person, and what you do with it is your decision. ‘

‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘Within hours of any time we talk to a critic of Scientology you, within hours, come up and say that is an extortionist, that is a sexual pervert. It is as if you are terrified of anyone criticising your organisation. It is as if you have something that you have got to hide.’

As in Plant City that very morning, Tommy closed in on me, inches from my face. ‘I am not terrified of anything. And you know what I have absolutely nothing to hide whatsoever. Zero. You can dig and dig and dig.’

‘OK, well, give us some access. Come, let’s have some access. Let’s go to these places.’

‘To a hostile reporter who has no intention of giving a balanced report? You give more weight and importance and now more hours of time to people critical of the Church than you did anyone else.’

‘I spent ten hours with you,’ I told Tommy. ‘I have spent barely a quarter of an hour with Shawn before you pop up from nowhere. But we want access, we want to film with you, but you stipulated: “no mention of the word cult.” Shawn, do you think the Church of Scientology is a cult?’

‘It is absolutely a cult,’ said Shawn. Tommy was off, walking back to his SUV. ‘It has all the definitions of a cult. The fact that one of their own spokespersons can’t face that question is why they are called a cult.’

Tommy had gone but the silent Scientology cameraman had stayed behind, to film everything Shawn and I said. It was irritating but the United States of America is a free country.

Scientologists staged a poster campaign in Clearwater, denouncing Shawn: ‘They put up a lot of posters saying that I was a pervert, convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct and I needed to be watched. It was just trying to keep me out of downtown. Just trying to embarrass me enough not to show my face down there. But the funny thing about it is they put it on the windows of all the shops that they are associated with behind the scenes, which shows on a grand scale exactly how big their force is in our downtown core. And of course every public Scientologist when asked to do something by the Church doesn’t say no. So you can tell who owns what down town.’

My final question to Shawn was pretty similar to my first. ‘Why did you pick on them? Aren’t you a little bit crazy to do this?’

‘It was the 500 pound gorilla in the room. Here in Clearwater everybody talks about it in their living rooms and jokes about it in the bars and in the little cafes, but nobody really knows, has an idea what it is really about. It has to be shown. How deep are the fingers of Scientology in this community? We can’t come down town and just get a Starbuck’s coffee if we want to drink, read the paper on a Sunday, especially if you are somebody like me, you are an enemy. You are everything bad. When they pull up here, when they assault me on the street corner, when their children in the presence of their parents hiss and spit at me. That’s them telling their story about their own religion. You can’t get any better than that.’

We said our goodbyes and headed for California. I had found him good company, and a sane and self-deprecating witness.

That was the last time I ever saw Shawn Lonsdale. His body was found by police in February, 2008. Shawn had his own demons, no doubt, but it seems difficult to see how the Church of Scientology can square its claim to be granted the respect due a religion with wallpapering Clearwater with posters dragging up a lone critic’s past sexual indignities. Or, indeed, Tommy Davis demonizing him to the BBC by reading out his criminal record on camera.

Did the Church drive Shawn to suicide? I do not know. Did the Church act kindly towards a critic? It did not.

I broadcast a short obituary of Shawn on BBC Radio Four’s
From Our Own Correspondent
: ‘Clearwater got that little bit more creepy recently, with the death – the police are treating it as suicide – of Shawn. When alive a Scientology spokesman said of him: “He has no redeeming value to anyone, anywhere.” Well, he was a bit of a hero to me. I, for one, mourn the loss of a brave and singular American.’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Your needle’s floating, Tom’

B
ack in the day, the story goes, four science fiction writers - Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and L Ron Hubbard - were hanging out late at night in 1940 in LA, drinking and putting the world to rights. They made a bet, who could dream up the best religion? Asimov explained in a TV interview in the 1980s that it was more of a dare than a true bet, and the goal was not a religion proper but ‘who can make the best religious story.’ The results were ‘
Nightfall
’ by Asimov, ‘
Dune
’ by Herbert, ‘
Job
’ by Heinlein and ‘
Dianetics
’ by Hubbard. If the first version of the story is true, Hubbard won the bet.

They say L Ron also said: ‘Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.’

Asimov is long dead but his niece, Nanette, is alive and well and lives in San Francisco where she works as a reporter on the city’s Chronicle newspaper. In 2004 she investigated the claims by Narconon – the anti-addiction programme promoted by the Church of Scientology – that it is an astonishingly successful drug therapy.

Narconon’s enthusiasts assert that drug addicts can be cured by long spells in the sauna and lots of Vitamin B or Niacin. Mr Hubbard had worked out that addicts could sweat out drugs like heroin from their fat. Tommy Davis told me that Narconon enjoyed an 80% success rate and Charles Hendry MP praised its success in the House of Commons in 2005: ‘I have seen for myself their project to take people away from drug addiction… Many of us have seen the good work that they do in those areas.’

Nanette Asimov’s investigation suggested this was mumbo-jumbo. She reported one year prior to the British MP’s endorsement and her series of stories was and is widely available on the internet for anyone to read. Nanette reported that addiction experts found Narconon ‘pseudoscience’ unsupported by scientific evidence; its drug education based on nonsense that drugs stay indefinitely in fat; its claim that drug residues produce a coloured ooze when exiting the body also nonsense; that sweating in a sauna helps you beat addiction, also nonsense.

On the trail of finding out more about Narconon, we flew from Florida to somewhere in the middle to somewhere on the West Coast. It took the rest of the day and much of the night. To someone who comes from a country where the sea is never further than 70 miles away, the United States of America is rather big. We had no sense that anyone was following us.

We woke in Oakland, on the other side of the bay from San Francisco. In Frisco, we popped along to the Scientology Org where I was not welcome. Later, we met Steve Heilig, a public health expert at the San Francisco Medical Society, who was asked by the San Francisco school board to review the Narconon drug education programme after Nanette’s reporting. He worked with four physicians and another public health authority, so that his conclusion was based on the work of a spread of experts.

And his finding on Narconon? Heilig described it as ‘out-dated, non-evidence-based and sometimes factually inaccurate.’

Scientology’s Narconon programme appears to be predicated on the belief that all drugs are fat-soluble, stay in the body long-term but can be flushed out by sweating. Science says that’s rubbish. Drugs like heroin are flushed out of the body in a few days, cannabis in a month or so. Long term, they’re not fat-soluble.

Heilig told me: ‘The approach favoured by Narconon was not supported by science. So given that falsehood, to use a blunt term, we recommended they be removed from San Francisco’s schools.’

I asked what struck him as being unusual about Narconon?

‘The idea that if you could approach it properly, sweat this out, that you would have different colours of ooze coming out of your skin which represented the drugs. That struck our experts as quote unquote “science fiction”’.

Not science fact?

‘Not science fact.’

The main purpose of our trip to San Francisco was to meet Bruce Hines, an ex-Scientologist who had ‘audited’ – that means heard the confessions of – stars such as Nicole Kidman, Kirstie Alley, Anne Archer, Tommy Davis’s mother and, briefly, Tom Cruise. It is a confession. At the end, the confessor proclaims: ‘By the power invested in me by the Church of Scientology, anything you have truthfully divulged is hereby forgiven by Scientologists.’

Bruce was once a true believer, a devoted acolyte of the religion and so trusted by the high command that he heard the confessions of its most precious parishioners. He had joined Scientology in 1972 when he was a 22-year-old physics student, and left in 2003, after three decades. From 1979 to 2003 he had been in the Sea Org.

Now that he is out, he is back studying physics, in particular cryogenic dark matter search or CDMS. Bruce explained to me by email what this means: ‘About 80% of the matter in the universe is made of something unknown. It can’t be detected by usual means, because it does not emit nor reflect light or any electromagnetic radiation. So it is called dark matter. It is different than what composes stars, planets, atoms, people, etc. This is not to be confused with “dark energy”, which is something else. It is definite that this dark matter exists, but to date no one knows for sure what it is made of. There are a few theories. I work as part of a collaboration that is testing one of these theories, the favored theory at the moment. I am with the University of Colorado, Denver. Some of the other institutions in the collaboration are MIT, Cal Tech, U of California Berkeley, Fermilab, NIST, Stanford, SLAC, U of Minnesota, U of Florida, Texas A&M, U of California Santa Barbara, U of British Columbia in Canada, Queen’s U in Canada, a university in Madrid, the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and a few others. It is very competitive. There are some other international collaborations composed of major institutions racing to make the same discovery, i.e. exactly what it this dark matter made of. It is currently one of the most major unanswered questions in the world of physics. Most agree that it could lead to Nobel Prizes, not that I could possibly be awarded one.’