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We will begin the session now.
You will remain aware of everything that goes on.
Okay.
We're going to find an incident in your life
you have an exact record of.
Then by sending you through it at the time it happened,
we're going to reduce it.
We will reduce the pain.
Go to the beginning of that incident.
Tell me what's happening.
Well, these things get all so...
I joined in 198...
It was a bunch of young kids, like I was young...
We were all very heated, very excited about this.
Can you recall a time when you were happy?
I think the first time I saw Hubbard, and I was in awe...
We did, because you thought we were doing good.
I mean, so you had some gratification.
I felt a tremendous amount of relief.
I got the answers for everything
within the religion.
What are you most afraid of?
It was dark. 3:00 in the morning,
there's a knock on the hotel-room door.
Stop! I'll say whatever you want,
I'll write up anything that you want.
I flipped out. I started punching holes in the walls.
Things didn't seem quite right.
And you just feel so foolish at that point.
Do you have a secret you're afraid I'll find out?
Yes. Yes.
Go to the beginning of that incident.
Okay, all right.
Tell me about it.
I was 21 years old,
living in London, Ontario, Canada.
I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker.
And someone had told me
about what they called... They said, "there's this cult
"in New York called scientology,"
which I'd never heard of.
"And if you give them all your money,
"they'll make anything possible in your life."
And about six months later, i was walking down the street.
This guy was there selling books.
And I realized they were all the same book...
"Dianetics,"
which again, i had never heard of.
He handed me one and asked me to look at it.
He was talking. I wasn't really listening to him.
I opened the cover and it said...
Stamped on the inside page, it said "church of scientology."
And I said, "take me there."
All right. All right, here we go.
I'm not a great multitasker.
You know, and if I feel like doing something, that's what I do.
And, uh, I was into this shit,
and I was becoming an auditor.
Like, I was in scientology probably four months,
and I had done more than John Travolta had done,
and he'd been there for 85 years or some shit.
My agents called, you know, "you got an audition."
"Eh, fuck it, I don't really..." You know what I mean?
I was on... I'm on a spiritual adventure,
and this was like, "whoa, this is an interesting road."
You know?
So, uh, what was the question?
So tell me, how was it you first got involved in scientology?
Well, I was introduced to it by some friends.
I don't know if they said it or if it was just talked about
by others that they had super powers.
And I... I was, like, really young,
but I thought, "I'd like to have super powers!"
But also I had done so much...
Political-social work.
So this really looked like... That it was a solution
to handling a lot of the world's problems.
Instead of trying to handle things en masse,
you could deal with it person by person,
make each person better, and thus the world would get better and surer.
Well, thank you very much,
and welcome to our whole new world.
It's a world where the operative phrase reads...
"Exceeding all expectations,
"transcending all parameters,
"extending the boundaries beyond any boundary,
"not to mention godspeed, lightning speed,
"and a quantum leap in sheer rapidity of progress up the bridge."
We're out to make every life extraordinary.
And if by chance it ever seems laborious or a sacrifice,
then you are looking at the offramps instead of the highway.
You are missing the signpost up ahead,
the one that reads, "next stop, infinity."
Probably my favorite concept of scientology
is a world without criminality,
a world without war, and a world without insanity.
And I know of no other group
that their goals are that clear.
Look, I don't... You name me another philosophy,
religion, or technology
that one of its main goals... Besides the three i mentioned earlier...
Where joy is the operative concept.
These are the times now, people.
Okay? These are the times we will all remember.
Were you there?
What did you do?
So what do you say? Can we clean this place up?
Yeah!
Okay. Because we're counting on you.
Okay?
All right? To lrh!
Hip-hip... Hooray!
Scientology is such a subject of fascination for people.
How did you get engaged in the story?
Well, I've always been interested in religions
and why people believe one idea rather than another.
I've studied Jonestown, radical islam.
They're oftentimes good-hearted people...
Idealistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty
that eliminates doubt.
You know, my goal wasn't to write an exposã©.
It was simply to understand scientology,
trying to understand what people get out of it.
You know, why do they go into it in the first place?
I was interested in intelligent and skeptical people
who are drawn into a belief system
and wind up acting on those beliefs
in ways they never thought they would.
The church of scientology turned out to be
two offices above a woolworth's store.
He asked me, "what's ruining your life?"
I said, "oh, I'm in love.
"I'm in love with this woman. It's impossible.
"I don't know what to do. I need some help."
And he said, "we can help you with that."
I said, "really?" "Yes."
And I ran home and got her, and I said, "we have to sign up for this.
"It sounds really good. It could save our relationship."
So we both signed up the next day to do a course,
which I think cost $50.
The thing that absolutely got me
and stayed with me forever
was the very first thing i read when you open the course pack,
and it said... I'm paraphrasing...
"Don't believe any of this. If it works for you, great.
"If it doesn't, discard it."
I was troubled by the fact that they called it a religion,
but I figured, "oh, it's some tax scam. It's fine with me.
"I don't really care about that as long as it works."
The first exercise, after you do all this reading and stuff like that,
is this thing called o-t-t-r-0,
which is basically, you stand... you sit
just like this, eyes closed,
three feet away from somebody who's doing the same thing,
and you basically confront them.
You know?
And in scientology lingo,
I went exterior.
Exteriorizing is what they call it.
You know, you leave your body.
So it was a... transcendent experience for me.,
and that made me go, "holy fucking shit,
"this is... wow."
I was reading books, going to lectures, and going to things...
Different events at the mission... at the local Santa Clara mission.
And then I knew i wanted to join the sea org
and get really involved as soon as I could,
which would be right out of high school.
Sea org is the most fraternal order of the organization.
It's people who really, really believe in the cause
and sign a billion-year contract,
which I did when I was... You know, as soon as I could.
I left skid marks getting to that billion-year contract.
You thought you were doing something good,
to have a positive effect on all of mankind.
That's what Howard says.
Everything you do for endless trillions of years
depends on what you do here and now within scientology.
I began to ask this question,
"what is man?" And I found, oddly enough,
that nobody could tell me what man was.
What did he consist of? Where was he going?
What was he doing?
To really know life, you've got to be part of life.
You must get down and look.
You must get into the nooks and crannies of existence,
the... you have to rub elbows
with all kinds and types of men
before you can finally establish what he is.
And you in fact did this?
Yes, I've slept with bandits in Mongolia,
and I've hunted with, uh,
pygmies in the Philippines.
Matter of fact, I've studied 21 different primitive races,
including the white race.
And my conclusions were
that man is a spiritual being
that was pulled down to the material,
the fleshly interests,
to an interplay in life that was, in fact,
too great for him to confront.
And I concluded, finally,
that he needed a hand.
To understand scientology,
you have to understand the life and mind of its inventor,
l. Ron Hubbard.
Hubbard was a prolific writer.
He actually holds the "guinness book of world records"
for the number of books published...
More than 1,000.
Hubbard got his start in the depression writing Pulp Fiction,
named for the cheap paper used.
Writers were paid a penny a word,
so hey had to write a lot to make money.
Hubbard hammered away so fast
on long rolls of butcher paper
that he used to drop sweat on his typewriter.
Hubbard's career took off when he began to write for a magazine
called "astounding science fiction."
Along with authors like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein,
Hubbard wrote stories with a sense of mission...
To get man to the stars.
He found his true mã©tier in science fiction.
And a lot of what scientology is
he had previously written about in the form
of his science fiction.
He had the ability to fabricate these amazing tales,
and he transported those imaginary stories
into his theology.
After Pearl Harbor, Hubbard took command of a sub chaser,
but he was still a man prone to invention.
He would write that he sunk two Japanese subs,
but, in fact, just off the coast of Oregon,
he opened fire on what turned out to be a log
and dropped most of his depth chargers
on underwater magnetic rocks.
When he accidentally shelled a Mexican island,
he was relieved of his command.
After the war,
Hubbard ended up in Los Angeles
where he settled in with a small group of seekers and visionaries.
A guy named Jack Parsons, a fascinating man,
was one of the founders of the jet-propulsion laboratory.
And there's actually a crater on the moon named after Jack.
He was a significant scientific figure,
but he was also the head honcho
in this black magic cult.
It was called the o.T.O.,
or the ordo templi orientis.
They followed the teachings of aleister crowley,
a famous sexual magic figure in england.
Parsons had a mansion in Pasadena.
They would have ceremonies,
and they were seeking some sort of goddess figure
that he could impregnate
in order to create the antichrist.
Hubbard moved in and became Parsons' assistant.
One night, this beautiful redhead
named Marjorie Cameron showed up at the door.
She was perfectly willing to engage in this sexual ritual
in order, supposedly, to produce the antichrist.
She and Jack eventually got married.
That happened after Hubbard ran off with Jack's girlfriend,
Sara Northrup.
Scientology and Hubbard
would later refuse to acknowledge
his relationship with Sara.
But we uncovered Sara's own recollections
of her time with Hubbard.
He was 13 years older than I was.
I thought he was a great war hero,
a captain of a ship that had been downed in the pacific.
And he was weeks on a raft,
and he'd been blinded by the sun,
and his back had been broken.
All these things were complete lies,
but I didn't know it at the time.
I believed every word of it.
If only Sara had seen Hubbard's military records.
In a 900-page file,
Hubbard's activities are laid out in extraordinary detail.
Hubbard told people that he had been blinded and crippled
during the war, and the practices that would form
the basis of scientology had cured him.
But his records show that his only wounds
were mild arthritis and conjunctivitis.
We had this terrible fight,
and he told me he was going to commit suicide
if I didn't marry him.
I really believed him,
so we got married.
We spent the winter in that lighthouse on the lake in the poconos.
I remember one awful night,
when I was asleep and he was out typing...
And he hit me across the side of the head
with a .45...
Because I was smiling in my sleep,
and he said I was thinking about somebody else.
I got up, left the house,
and walked on the ice of the lake.
I was terrified.
He always said that he would kill me
rather than let me leave him.
The only good thing i got from Ron
was my baby.
We moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey,
and he started writing "dianetics."
The book was conceived
and he started working on it in 1950.
He said many times that the only way to make any real money
was to have a religion.
That's essentially what he was trying to do with "dianetics"...
Get a religion where he could have an income
and the government wouldn't take it away from him
in the form of taxes.
"Dianetics" was an immense success.
From the moment it was published in 1950,
it swept through America and other countries around the world.
This book... That's the background of all of this.
That's what started all the trouble.
We expected this to sell about 6,000 copies,
and it hit the top of the bestseller list of "the New York times"
and just stayed there, month in, month out.
It was like i started an avalanche.
The modern science of mental health"
is considered to be the fundamental text,
which is the foundation upon which all else is built.
One of the theories of "dianetics"
is to discover these things that are very traumatic
or have been very upsetting to you,
and if you can observe
exactly what happened,
the power of that incident
to influence you today
is removed.
The concept of "dianetics"
is that you have two sides of your mind.
There is the analytical side,
which is a perfect computer.
It remembers everything. It's flawless.
It never makes a mistake.
And then there's a reactive side.
And this is where all your neuroses, anxieties,
and fears are stored.
And where do they come from? They come from engrams.
An engram is like a memory.
A man has an automobile accident.
He has a picture of an automobile accident.
He has all the sensations of having been hurt
in the automobile accident. It takes him a long time to recover,
because he's still wearing the automobile accident.
If you said, "hey, why don't you take
"this automobile accident and throw it away?"
Well, all of a sudden, he recovers
from the automobile accident, naturally,
because the thing that's keeping it impressed upon him
and his body is his mind.
An auditor is a practitioner in scientology.
He listens and he computes.
We have a meter.
A meter simply shows
where an individual is aberrated.
The e-meter is a very powerful instrument.
It's one-third of a lie detector.
A lie detector would also measure your respiration and pulse.
There's two cans
and there's electrical wires
carrying an undetectable amount of current
into a meter with a needle on it.
According to the church of scientology,
it actually detects the mass of your thoughts,
although there's no evidence that thoughts have mass.
The current passes through your body,
and as your mental mass increases,
so does the resistance to the circuit.
So the auditor will ask you a question,
"tell me about an upset with your mother."
"What's truly bothering you about being with, you know,
"with your wife's behavior? What is it?"
"Why are you upset today?"
"Well, I had a fight with my wife."
"Well, I can see."
"That there... Was that the same thought?"
"Say that again."
And gradually, the needle will have less response.
And in that manner, you discharge the emotion.
Then you're asked to go back to earlier incidents
that were like that.
And you might say, "well, my mother spoke to me
"in the same scolding tone of voice."
And you recount that story,
and eventually, you discharge the emotion.
And that's very much like freudian therapy.
But with scientology,
then they'll ask further.
"Well, that's as far back as I go."
Well, maybe not.
The auditor might say, "something just registered on the meter.
"What was that?"
"I had an image in my mind."
"Well, what was the image?"
"It was a barn."
"Are you inside the barn? Go back to that image.
"Okay, open the door. What do you see?"
"Well, it looks like 19th century France."
You walk outside and you see
the people dressed in their costumes,
and the e-meter is saying this is real.
This is a real memory.
It's just as real as those other memories that you had.
Beautiful little soft needle, and everything's good.
Needle's rising, which means he's getting, you know,
thinking a lot. The needle just, like, goes "pfft,"
like a lot of shit blows away.
The theta bop, which is a very quick little thing like, "doo doo doo,"
which means exteriorization.
When you come out of an auditing session,
you feel euphoric.
That confessional nature makes you feel better.
Somebody would say, "oh, you're going to have a session."
I would feel better just hearing that.
Man is asleep.
He is hypnotized.
Now in scientology, reverse the process,
and you'll make him wake up.
Such a man becomes un-brainwashed, you might say.
He becomes unhypnotized.
This sounds, Mr. Hubbard, in a sense,
like an extension of psychology or psychiatry.
Oh, no, psychiatry has to do with the insane,
and we have nothing to do with the insane whatsoever.
Is this is a form of psychoanalysis?
No, psychoanalysis, they lay back and...
Don't associate scientology with such people.
That's terrible. That's bad manners, you know?
When l. Ron Hubbard first wrote "dianetics,"
he thought it was a tremendous psychological breakthrough,
so much so that he would be recognized.
He wrote letters to the American psychological association.
They couldn't make heads or tail of his ideas.
To them, it was like psychological folk art.
For instance, he would talk about "clear."
That means that the individual
has erased his reactive mind...
His unconscious mind is gone...
And he is totally alert
and totally capable.
Once you've taken away all these traumatic memories,
from this life and previous ones,
then you are clear.
Someone who had a perfect memory,
who was never ill.
Your eyesight would be better.
We tested people before scientology processing
and after scientology processing,
and uniformly found that their IQ had raised.
We are making such individuals,
we're making them regularly, and we're making them routinely.
An overt act is an effort to individuate.
It is a withhold of oneself...
Ron gave lectures everywhere
for large amounts of money, and money just started pouring in.
I mean, these people were paying
$500 apiece in the 1950s
for training in "dianetics."
I felt that he was stealing from people
and that he was hoodwinking them.
All the business of sitting, holding hands,
and putting all these false memories into people's minds...
Then they would finally come along and say,
"oh, yes, i can remember it all."
We were surrounded by sycophants.
He began to believe that he was a savior and hero,
that he really was this God figure.
He was absolutely convinced
that he had the cure for the psychological ills of mankind,
and that the only reason that it wasn't being propagated far and wide
was that the medical profession had a vested interest
in keeping people sick.
I think he was afraid that some psychiatrists
would pop him into an institution.
He degenerated into a really paranoid,
terrifying person.
Sara threatened to leave Hubbard
unless he got psychiatric help.
He responded by kidnapping their baby
and taking her to Cuba.
He was incapable of taking care of her,
so he put her in the charge of a mother and daughter
who were both mentally retarded.
And they apparently kept her in some kind of cage.
He called me and told me that he had killed her.
He said he had cut her into little pieces
and dropped the pieces in a river,
and it was my fault.
Then he'd call me back and say that she was still alive.
And this went on and on and on.
When Hubbard came back to the U.S.,
Sara persuaded him to agree to a divorce
and give her custody of their daughter.
When I left him, he cleaned out
all the joint bank accounts
so that I wouldn't have any money.
Hubbard soon lost all his money, too.
"Dianetics" proved to be a passing fad, like the hula hoop.
But Hubbard still had his imagination.
So he repackaged the ideas of "dianetics"
into a religion called scientology.
Hubbard added more science and more structure.
Along with the e-meters came a payment plan.
Every step to "clear" had a price tag.
How would you describe your business model?
Rapacious.
It's all about making money.
Hubbard, from the beginning, knew that
people would pay for this counseling at a pretty good clip,
and so he continued to come out with more and more levels.
The real money was in paying for these higher and higher courses.
They were getting into thousands of dollars.
Those prices kept going up and up.
That's really where scientology begins
to create this indoctrination,
is, "it's Hubbard that came up with that,
"only Hubbard, and you have to be a part of our group
"to get that spiritual satisfaction you were looking for."
The Hubbard college of scientology,
qualifications division, department of certifications and awards
does hereby certify that Anthony a. Phillips
has obtained the state of clear.
As more members paid for Hubbard's bridge to total freedom,
the church's coffers swelled with hundreds of millions of dollars.
From the beginning, Hubbard tried to shelter that revenue
from any government taxes.
The founding church of scientology
attempted in 1967 to get a court determination
that it was exempt from federal taxation
on the basis that it was a nonprofit religious organization.
A federal court denied the founding church tax exemption,
saying that some of the church's earnings from 1955 to 1959
were used for the personal benefit of private individuals...
L. Ron Hubbard and family.
"Abc news" has repeatedly requested interviews with Mr. Hubbard.
We have been told that he is unavailable.
It was very exciting.
It was that heady mix of emotion and belief,
and it's... You get stuck to it.
It's so strong that it sticks you like glue,
and there's no way you can get away from it.
I was deeply convinced
that we were going to save the world.
I considered myself tremendously fortunate
to be in that position.
Out of the blue one day,
I received this envelope
with an invitation to join the sea project.
It was completely confidential.
I wasn't to tell anyone about it,
and I was so ecstatic.
Here was a chance to work with Hubbard.
And I signed, "yes!"
I was on my way to the greatest adventure in my life.
We had an overnight flight to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands,
where we found, at about 6:00 in the morning,
we were taxied down to a dock.
We had to climb up this rickety ladder,
all the way up to the ship,
and we couldn't believe this was where we were going.
This ship was a rusty hulk.
I was given a dirty old jumpsuit to get into,
missing one arm and the other one was almost half torn off,
and put to work. We had to scrub the ship and clean out the ship,
which was arduous, strenuous work,
in the heat.
Hubbard came to the ship every day,
smoking cigarettes and surveying his kingdom.
After dinner, he'd come and join us
on the well deck.
There he was, you know, right amongst us,
talking to us.
He would be his most magnificent self
at those times.
He'd lean back, he'd look up at the cosmos,
and he'd point out galaxies
and constellations,
and he'd say, "the fifth invaders are up there,
"and this is how they dressed and this is how they talk.
"And see that blip across the sky over there?"
He'd point it out, and we were all, "yes, we see it, we see it."
He'd say, "and that's one of their space vessels..."
And there was... the fourth invader force was here.
The fifth invader force came in.
And the name of this solar system is space station 33.
The fourth invader force had been there
for God knows how many skillion years,
had been sitting down...
And we'd sit there, spellbound.
You could hear a pin drop on that ship.
He had us emotionally captured and held
right there in the palm of his hand where he wanted us.
He had us right there.
In the early '60s,
Hubbard was under investigation in various countries.
His solution was to take to the high seas.
He made himself commodore of a fleet of three ships,
a scientology Navy.
To crew the vessels,
he created the sea organization.
The members of this so-called sea org
would become the church's clergy.
They began going from port to port
in the mediterranean, show up for a few days,
and then go off... sail off in some other direction.
And a very enterprising reporter
for Grenada television in britain
tracked him down...
Slate one, take one.
That's one of the very few instances
where Hubbard has actually appeared on camera.
What are you actually doing
on this ship now?
I am studying ancient civilizations,
trying to find what happened to them,
finding out why they went...
Into a decline, why they died.
Hubbard believed that he had lived various lives
in the mediterranean area as a venetian prince,
as an Italian prince.
As a matter of fact, it's quite interesting
that exercises can be conducted,
which demonstrate conclusively that there are memories
which exist prior to this life.
He had buried treasure all around the coastline,
and he wanted to go find all these caches of treasure.
We were all very heated, very excited about this.
Whatever was his whim, we did.
We would have died for the old man.
Don't you wake up sometimes
in the middle of the night and think to yourself,
"well, I've been on this ship with a whole lot
"of scientologists who believe I'm fantastic..."
They don't believe I'm fantastic.
If you saw the number of times they don't follow my orders...
Lrh started to devise
a system of penalties or punishments
or what he called ethics.
And one of the penalties for the auditors
making mistakes in their auditing sessions
was to be tossed overboard.
"You have done such and such and such and such,
"and we commit your errors to the deep."
And then just pushed overboard.
30 feet, 35 feet,
do you ever think that you might be quite mad?
Oh, yes!
The one man in the world who never believes he's mad
is the madman.
So we got married a year and a half after we joined
and moved to California. I wanted to be a writer,
and my wife... She was studying scientology.
We had a baby right away, and the only people
we knew there were scientologists.
I was working as a furniture mover during the day
and writing spec scripts at night.
Then on the weekends, I'd be, you know, doing some auditing.
Can you recall a time when you were happy?
There was a social aspect to it too.
You got to hang out with people.
And there were some interesting people, nice people.
These are all people who are looking to improve their life.
While Hubbard was hiding from public view,
he was very active in directing the operations of the church,
particularly in Hollywood.
This was just after the haight-ashbury era.
And what scientology was selling itself is,
"get high without drugs."
It was a place where people went and explored ideas,
and you would often see famous people...
Leonard Cohen, members of the grateful dead,
rock Hudson.
So they built the celebrity centre.
The idea was to draw in these famous entertainers
and use them as pitchmen for the religion.
In an industry like Hollywood,
where stardom is such... Such an illusive quality,
scientology would offer a route to maybe feel a little bit more secure.
And when you're trying to break in, you're also dealing with
relentless rejection.
And something that helps you stay focused
and feel that you're improving yourself
and becoming more clear, you can see the appeal of that.
The beliefs and practices that I have studied in scientology
have been invaluable to me.
Have you ever met Ron Hubbard?
I'd love to. I'd be honored, because i think he's so brilliant.
So when I worked at the celebrity centre,
I would just, you know, recruit various people.
Like Priscilla Presley and of course John Travolta.
Johnny... he came, he started on course,
and he was so fun and outrageous.
And he just made a party wherever he was.
John Travolta was a young actor
in his very first movie.
He was a troubled young man,
and he was looking for help.
A fellow actor gave him a little bit of scientology counseling.
She gave him a copy of "dianetics,"
and he was transported by this.
He would go out on his auditions,
and no matter what he went out for,
he would get it.
A band-aid commercial, right away he booked that.
Now the army starts you...
He was booking everything,
and then he went up for a series.
Of course, he books it.
And it's a big series... "Welcome back, kotter."
Up your nose with a rubber hose!
In the late '70s and early '80s,
John Travolta was scientology's biggest star.
Spanky was assigned to be travolta’s key contact with the church,
and she helped out with producers, fans, and the press.
They became close, and when spanky got married,
Travolta was there.
When Johnny first got into scientology,
he didn't even believe in himself that much.
But he got injected with a lot of confidence,
and then you get this phobia inducement
that "if I leave, it's all going to go down the tubes."
When you're in the organization,
all the good that happens to you
is because of scientology,
and everything that doesn't, that isn't good, is your fault.
They sell it all in the beginning as something quite logical.
Everything makes sense.
And you're going up what they call the bridge,
you're dong this auditing, and this is good.
And the next one, well, it's not quite as good.
It didn't quite make sense to you, but...
You know, you've already paid for the next one, so you'll do that one.
The bridge... It's a metaphor.
You start here at the bottom of the bridge
and then you go to the top, so where it is...
It's an awareness scale.
You start down here and you're not aware of anything,
then you go up here and you're a lot more aware
of who you are,
your spirituality, your relationship to others.
A person is supposed to become more able
as they go up the bridge.
And then there are the ot levels...
Operating thetan.
And a thetan is a spiritual being.
That's the soul of the person.
And what level, over time, did you achieve?
Ot eight. That's the highest there is.
You can't get any higher than ot eight.
From the beginning, you hear these stories
people tell of these abilities they've been able to gain.
It was always talked about, the people who were ot could read your mind,
and they could move objects at will,
and they could... They were cause over matter, energy, space, and time,
so it sounded damn good to me.
I mean, I thought, "wow, this is great."
I finally get to ot three,
and they give me the secret materials,
which I've been hearing about all this time.
They're handwritten by Hubbard.
You have to keep them in a locked briefcase,
be very cautious, because they always said,
"if this gets out, it's dangerous to people.
"It could actually do them harm if they are not adequately prepared."
And I read it.
And...
It doesn't make any sense.
This gobbled story that didn't make sense.
I remember for one fleeting second thinking, "maybe it's an insanity test.
"Maybe if you believe this, they kick you out.
"You know, maybe that's it." That, of course, is not the case.
They talk about, you know, the fact that the earth was created
in such-and-such trillions of years ago,
and this guy... Space guy...
Galactic overlord... This was a prison planet,
and people being caught, captured,
and being brought to planet earth...
And put them in volcanoes and blowing them up with a-bombs.
Whoa!
I studied geography in school.
Those volcanoes didn't exist 75 million years ago.
And we have these lost souls all over us
and we have to get rid of them, and I'm going,
"what... the fuck are you talking about?
"I mean, I'm down for the self-help stuff.
"I'm down for... Okay, I can be clear.
"I can get rid of the negative emotions.
"But what the fuck is this?"
When you get to the upper levels of scientology,
the creation myth is explained to you.
The story is that 75 million years ago,
people lived in a world very much like the world
of America in the 1950s.
People, at that particular time and space,
were walking around in clothes which looked
very remarkably like the clothes they wear in this very minute.
And the cars they drove looked exactly the same,
and they walked down streets that looked like these streets.
It was a very similar world
and similar problems,
one of which was overpopulation.
They had elected a fellow
by the name of xenu to the supreme ruler.
There was a tyrannical overlord
of the galactic confederacy named xenu.
In order to resolve this problem of overpopulation,
he called people in,
ostensibly for tax audits,
and had them frozen with injections
of glycol to their heart.
Boxed them up in boxes, threw 'em into space planes...
DC-8 airplane is the exact copy
of the space plane of that day.
They were flown to the prison planet, teegeeack...
It's actually the planet earth...
And these frozen bodies were then dropped into volcanoes.
And then they set off hydrogen bombs
on the top of each volcano.
And their disembodied spirits...
These are called thetans...
Floated out, and they were captured
and forced to sit in front of movie screens.
With a 3d, super colossal, motion picture.
They were shown images...
Implants, as Hubbard would have it.
Every man is shown crucified,
so is the psychiatrist shown crucified.
And that's how he gets away with what he gets away with.
He electric-shocks people.
And when a child is born,
a thetan will leap inside the child's body
at that very instant, and it becomes like the child's soul.
More than one thetan might crowd into the body...
Hundreds, or thousands, might.
They're the source of all of our neurosis,
fears, and anxieties.
Then you are on the e-meter,
by yourself, now.
You're soloing.
You're supposed to scan, mentally,
from your top of your head to your toes,
to see if you can locate any alien beings.
And when you do, you tell them to go away.
I kept on trying to audit.
I could not figure out how I could have
all these spirits of dead people attached to me,
inside me, on me.
I was clear.
For God's sake, I was clear.
People actually have breakdowns,
you know, nervous breakdowns,
because they spend so much time thinking
about being infested by these creatures.
If you're really believing that, it can drive you crazy.
Those years of introspection
eventually led me to sincerely considering
that I was so bad,
that I couldn't confront how bad I was.
I didn't know it at the time,
but a depression set in that was with me for years,
and the worst thing was
that lrh kept ordering me to more auditing.
I had to find swords that were stuck in me...
Hypothetical swords,
imaginary swords that were causing all this pain.
This auditing went on and on.
It wasn't doing any good.
I should have been left alone.
But everything that I took offense with,
I rationalized almost immediately.
I had to.
I could not continue in this game of scientology
without explaining away what he was doing.
It got to be a way of believing,
and every one of us got into that.
It was part of the mind control.
It was part of the cultic manipulation.
He was the master who did it to us,
and we took it on and then we did it to ourselves.
And I learned from it,
that I would never ever again,
you know, go... Do the bidding of a tyrant.
Hubbard questioned his own sanity
and actually wrote a letter to the veteran's administration
asking for psychiatric help
that he seems never to have been given.
I think that his whole creation of scientology
really was a form of self-therapy.
If he were just a fraud, then at some point,
he would have taken the money and run,
but he never did that.
He spent much of his day on the e-meter,
trying to understand what was going on
inside his own mind.
Hubbard became increasingly paranoid
that a powerful thetan had infected his body
and that regular auditing
wasn't strong enough to make it leave.
When Larry Wright was researching his book,
he videotaped an interview with a scientologist
who was asked to help Hubbard expel the thetan.
He was having, uh, problems
getting rid of a bt... Body thetan...
So he wanted me to build a machine,
and basically blow the thetan away,
just get him out of there.
Blow him out. And also kill the body.
Basically, yeah. Yeah.
But I didn't want to kill him.
I just wanted to scare him.
So I had read some books about Nikola tesla and stuff,
and I figured maybe buildin' a tesla coil
would probably be the best route to go.
I had little electrodes
that you hook it up to the e-meter,
so when he's on the cans,
then, uh, he would just flip the button,
and it would do its thing.
As far as I know. He blew up my e-meter.
Burned it up.
Scientology really is a journey
into the mind of l. Ron Hubbard.
And the further you get into it,
the more like l. Ron Hubbard you become.
Thank you.
In 1980, lrh moved off the lines
so that he could continue his writings
and researches without any distractions.
He has now moved on to his next ot...
Level of ot research.
This level is beyond anything any one of us ever imagined.
This level is in fact done
in an exterior state,
meaning that it is done completely exterior
from the body.
At this level of ot,
the body is nothing more
than an impediment and encumbrance
to any further gain as an ot.
Thus...
Thus, at 2000 hours,
Friday, the 24th of January,
a.D. 36,
l. Ron Hubbard discarded the body
he had used in this lifetime
for 74 years, 10 months, and 11 days.
Although you may feel grief,
understand that he did not, and does not now.
Hubbard died of a stroke in 1986,
but he left no plan for succession.
The ambitious David Miscavige stepped forward,
and by bending arms and making deals,
took control of the church
and installed a new generation of lieutenants.
We want to make sure
that all of us end cycle on this completely,
so we can get on with the job
that is ahead of us.
The first time I met Miscavige was in '83.
He was a guy running back and forth
between Hubbard and the property in hemet in a van...
Back and forth, delivering messages.
Worked my way through the organization.
Miscavige would come down to Florida,
where I was running the place,
and we slowly but surely became friends.
By 2001, i was working directly for Miscavige.
We'd sit and drink a bottle of scotch,
and I'd hear everything he had to say about the church,
and about the people involved, from his perspective.
And honestly, it was... It was, uh, horrifying. It was scary.
In scientology, there was a concept
that 98% of the people are good and 2% are evil.
Well, he worked very hard to convince me
that it was the other way around.
2.5% were okay and the rest were very evil and bad.
And somehow, they'd all been dumped on that base
so they could be around him.
He was... He was extremely paranoid.
So, Marty, is Miscavige a true believer?
Uh, yes.
He has to continue to believe,
because if he looks at it rationally
and he sees that it is as I say,
it will destroy him.
You know, he'll just realize that...
Because he's done a lot worse than I've done.
He's abused people on a personal level,
um, as a... as a... That's how he got to the top,
and that's how he stayed at the top.
At the age of 11,
David Miscavige joined the church with his parents.
As a child, his ambition caught Hubbard's eye.
So when Hubbard wanted to become a filmmaker,
Miscavige was his assistant cameraman.
An auditing prodigy,
he claimed scientology cured his asthma.
He became a sort of general contractor for the church,
and was soon named action chief...
The man who did whatever needed doing for a church
that developed a scary reputation
for attacking its critics.
Scientology has been in the headlines
off and on for 25 years now,
almost since the time it was founded as a religion.
Scientology's story is one of a church
embittered by what it perceives as harassment.
We're talking about attacks
from multi-billion dollar media conglomerates,
world governments... Real powers of the world.
They take enemies very seriously.
This comes right out of Hubbard's own policies
from the '60s, saying, "we never defend, we always attack."
And they have followed it ever since.
They call it "fair game,"
and anybody who criticizes scientology is fair game.
Whatever you're told,
whatever needs to be done,
if it's against the law, it doesn't matter.
The best example is, in the mid '70s,
scientologists were walking in to these department of justice offices
and IRS offices and taking documents out by the yard.
The FBI raided the church of scientology...
The largest raid in FBI history at that time.
Oh my God. The building is filled with FBI,
and they're... They're taking things.
It was craziness.
Clearly, l. Ron Hubbard was in charge of all of that,
but he was only named an unindicted co-conspirator.
And Mary sue Hubbard, Hubbard's wife,
she went to prison, 10 others went to prison.
This was where i cut my teeth. I was in my early 20s,
Miscavige was in his early 20s.
We were taking over for this group
that had created the largest domestic espionage operation
in the history of the United States.
They were breaking into offices,
framing people. This is the activities of a church?
There was a guy who, uh, you know,
was a reporter for "the LA times,"
whose dog was poisoned
while he was working on a scientology story.
Again and again while reporting the story,
we met many former members who describe scientology
as a dangerous and deeply paranoid organization.
They hired private detectives to harass people.
I have been sued twice.
Financial ruin.
Years of harassment.
Their homes broken into, have them beaten.
We chased her around. We followed her to the airport.
Gotten ahold of personal phone records.
Slashed their tires, break their car windows.
I was locked in a chicken wire cage.
Dangerous, horrifying, terrifying fraud.
A nightmare.
Many of their stories are corroborated
in sworn court testimony by up to a dozen other people.
Are they all lying?
They sat in a room,
they figured out what they were going to say...
My position, as the spokesperson,
was to evade the question,
or sleaze around some way,
or give what was an acceptable answer,
or something that I believed at the time.
Please welcome Mr. Mike rinder.
Because scientology is perceived
and conceived by scientologists
as being the salvation for mankind,
you can have people that lie
with a very straight face
if they believe that what they are doing
is protecting the church of scientology.
L. Ron Hubbard says,
"we do not find critics of scientology
"who do not have criminal pasts."
Do you believe that? Sure.
People who oppose you are undoubtedly criminals?
I believe that, yeah.
You know, there isn't and hasn't been
any effort which has been taken to,
quote, "silence critics."
"No, that doesn't happen.
"Oh, we would never do that."
But according to many insiders,
Hubbard was growing more and more vindictive
toward those who stood in his way.
He created what he called the rehabilitation project force.
The rpf was what we called it.
It was the prison camp,
where you'd go for re-indoctrination.
It was on the 7th floor
of the Hollywood headquarters,
a confined space to rehabilitate members
who might be harboring subversive thoughts.
Spanky was sent to the rpf
when she objected to the way the church
had denied medical treatment to her boss.
I went thinking, of course,
this is a big mistake.
And then I got there, and there were like 200 of us.
So much of the exec strata of the organization there
hit the skids simultaneously.
Rpf stands for rehabilitation project force.
It is a program that is exclusively
for the benefit of sea organization members.
If they are stressed out,
if they're not doing well on their job,
have them do menial-type work,
and five hours a day of auditing
and scientology training.
It's a fabulous program.
We were working... Cross my heart...
30 hours on, three hours off.
Doing, like, hard labor,
like having wire brushes on windowsills,
and sanding and sanding and sanding.
Breathing paint fumes.
The regular crew would eat first,
and then we'd get what was left.
It was kinda like table scraps.
There was mattresses out there on the roof,
and they were wet and soggy and gross.
And if you got to sleep for three hours,
sometimes you'd just have to up there and crash out.
And I had a young child at that time,
who was 10 months old when I went to the rpf.
She got taken and put in the cadet org,
the organization for the children.
And then I... I got pregnant
when I was in the rpf.
So now I'm sanding walls, eating table scraps,
pregnant, and worrying myself sick about my child.
In spanky's time, the children
of sea org members were separated
from their parents and raised in the cadet org
to remove all distractions
from their parent's ultimate responsibility,
to clear the planet.
Sea org members were often pressured to have abortions,
because the church viewed "getting children"
as an unpractical burden.
Initially, you're like, "this is absurd.
"This is nuts."
And then you kinda settle in and go, "well...
"Obviously, I need to deal with something
"that I'm not facing.
"So perhaps this is...
"They're doing this to make me better."
There are so many bizarre stories that you...
Just hard to believe stuff.
They asked if I could arrange a private screening
of "Saturday night fever."
And I was like, "what?"
"I had disappeared from this man's life.
"I abandoned him,
"and now you want me to arrange a private screening?
"What are you..."
I said, "is there anything else? Maybe a Beatles reunion?"
Travolta had been wondering where spanky was.
When she was sent to the rpf,
she was not allowed to contact him or anyone else.
But now, under the watch of a guard,
she was permitted to call travolta’s assistant.
She said we could use John's personal print of the film,
under one condition... That you will see John.
I was so excited.
I hadn't had dialogue with him for many months.
We had the screening of the film,
and on the next night,
I was supposed to have dinner with Johnny.
And after the screening,
I was abruptly told i wasn't going to see him,
and I needed to call and cancel.
He was truly angry at me for... for...
For having allowed this abuse of myself, you know,
and for having that... So little of myself...
That I would allow this degree of degradation,
and, and um... And...
And he was my good friend,
and I knew that he was telling me the truth.
Those words were such a wakeup call for me.
And I went over there, to the cadet org.
There were so many sick children in there,
and my daughter was very, very ill...
Burning up with fever, completely neglected,
in a urine-soaked crib.
Her eyes were so filled with mucus,
they were welded shut.
She had fruit flies on her body.
And I just... I couldn't bear it.
I just went, "no, mmm-mmm, I'm done."
I mean, I just knew i could make these choices for me.
I could decide to give up my life
and do this to help the world,
but I couldn't make these choices for my children.
I just had to get her out.
I told them that I was having problems with my pregnancy,
and I needed to use the phone,
so they sent a bodyguard with me.
I called one of the few non-scientologists I knew,
a wonderful woman who happened to work for John Travolta.
I said, "meet me at this address."
I gave her a time and I hung up.
I go up to my daughter's room, and I wrapped her up.
And there's that bodyguard with me.
I said, "oh, my sister-in-law is in that car
"and she's gonna take the baby to the doctor."
He said, "well, has this been approved?"
"Of course it was approved!"
She's in my arms, and I got in the car.
My friend, she just nods her head.
Boom! With that, i pull my leg in, shut that door.
She hits the locks, and we drive.
And people are yelling my name,
saying, "spanky, no! No!"
I mean, just freaked out.
I'm thinkin' "I'm a dead person,
"something terrible is gonna happen to me."
I was just so frightened
that they would come to fetch me up.
One of the turning points
in travolta’s relationship with the church
is when he understood what was happening to spanky,
he didn't do anything about it.
I know that he certainly got exposed
to the fact that not everything was on the up and up.
Why that wasn't sufficient for him to leave,
I don't know.
I often wonder what... What could possibly keep him there?
Can you recall an incident
which occurred when your mother looked younger?
An auditor learns to keep notes contemporaneously
as he is doing a session,
about every detail of the person's life,
back to birth and beyond.
If you do the whole program,
you end up with up to a file cabinet full
of pre-clear folders on notations about your life,
your thoughts, and your considerations about your life.
It's the most intimate detail.
You're always encouraged, you're always threatened,
to disclose more and more and more. And all of it's recorded.
All of this material,
which is represented to you to be held sacrosanct...
In fact, any information
that might do some harm to the organization,
gets unclassified automatically
and gets reported to another branch of the church
that deals with "ethics."
Travolta was down in clearwater.
We'd finished the renovations.
Every auditing room had two cameras...
One on the meter, and one on the guy getting auditing.
Miscavige would sit in this 15x15 room,
cameras of every session.
You can flip in between 'em,
and he was watching these things.
And it was for "training purposes."
Well, Travolta saw that,
and he said, "i will not be videoed."
So I was there when they were setting it up,
and Miscavige was directing it.
"Get him into a hotel room,
"hook up secret, private videos."
There were rumors
that he was threatening to leave,
and another scientologist told me that he was delegated
to create a black PR package... All the damaging material
they could use against Travolta,
which came from his auditing sessions.
I know this because I used to do it
when I was the head of the office of special affairs.
We would put a team of people
onto going through all of these pc folders
and finding things that they believe.
By exposing them or threatening to expose them,
they will cower the person
that they're worried about into silence.
There is a particular writing
where Hubbard is training these office of special affairs people
on how, when you use private information
to control somebody to do what you want them to do,
and to silence them from speaking out against scientology,
it's really not blackmail, because you're not asking for money.
But you're holding this secret information
over the person's head to silence them.
As far as Travolta is concerned,
people say, well, he... There's all these things that we know about
that have been rumored in the tabloids.
But in fact, it's more of a two-way street.
You know, he's provided with an auditor
whose shoulder he can cry on,
but he's also provided with the muscle of the church,
in the form of myself and Mike rinder.
On many occasions,
we were sent out to get with his publicist,
to get with his lawyer,
and to help squash or intimidate these people
that are making accusations against him.
Once that happened,
I think he was really the church's captive.
Mr. John Travolta!
When they were facing lawsuits and stuff like that,
he'd be brought forward,
and make his testimony about how great scientology is.
He had the opportunity
to affect the behavior of the church, and he chose not to.
Now I've been a scientologist for 23 years.
I've felt like a pioneer in many... in many ways,
and I've... I've seen my efforts come to fruition...
In various ways.
I think very few people can say that.
I've... I'm part of a... Of a frontier in a way,
you know, that, that very few people ever get to be part of.
Thank you.
Welcome to church!
It was the biggest event in scientology history,
and of course, Miscavige wanted to milk it for everything he had.
It's this grand, produced thing,
where it's all a single person on a gigantic stage,
all this sort of Nazi symbolism.
I clearly recall getting prepared for the event
and Miscavige up in that office,
you know, going 18-20 hours a day
writing this speech, and thinking to myself,
"my God, you know? This is not just
"a victory celebration,
"this is a... This is a coup."
What we are going to talk about
is the war to end all wars.
When you are in scientology, you are in all the way.
There's no half in and half out.
A decade into Miscavige's leadership,
a simmering crisis finally came to a boil.
For years Hubbard had insisted that scientology was a religion
and should be tax-exempt,
so he had refused to pay any taxes.
We were facing a tax bill
of over a billion dollars, and the total assets,
liquid and material, and property of the church
was about a quarter of that at the time, in the '80s.
And so just from a real simple accounting basis,
it was life and death.
If we don't get exemption, we die.
If we get it, we survive.
As lrh said,
"one certainly couldn't contest anyone
"as holy as the commissioner of the IRS,
"whom I believe gives God his orders." Lrh.
Faced with this crisis,
David Miscavige formulated a strategy.
Think of the nerve that it takes
to decide to take on a war with the IRS.
The church of scientology
has been crucifying the federal agency
for its sins on a regular basis,
both in and out of courts.
Thousands of scientologists all filed lawsuits,
not just against the IRS,
but against individual IRS employees.
2400 total lawsuits,
all going at the IRS at one time.
It was a litigation nightmare.
Being Miscavige's right-hand man,
I was in charge of all those efforts.
We were not only suing them in every possible jurisdiction there was,
we were investigating the IRS for crimes generally,
or things that would offend the public.
These hearings into IRS integrity...
In the late '80s,
there were hearings about IRS abuses
that had nothing to do with scientology,
had nothing to do with nonprofits,
had nothing to do with churches.
They had to do with Joe taxpayer.
And they we were publishing these glossy,
expensive magazines.
In fact, the exposã©s of IRS crimes
were so hated that possession of "freedom" magazine
was banned by IRS officials in the IRS building.
There is going to be a IRS conference in the catskills.
Right? And so we would send a pi,
find out which hotel it's gonna be at,
get down there during happy hour, socialize.
And this guy's tallying who's drinkin' what.
And so we go through freedom of information act
to find out that the taxpayers are paying the bar bill,
and it's so much money.
And of course, you know,
in the scheme of things, it's nothing.
But from a PR perspective, it's everything.
IRS officials told me to my face
they weren't interested in hearing anything
I had to say because, and I quote,
"you are a scientologist.
"You are a mindless robot."
Well, those who know me can imagine my response.
It was short, but certainly made the point.
A negotiation began to take place
between the IRS and the church of scientology.
How do you define a religion?
It's not so easy.
Why is one body of thinking a religion
and another body not?
The only organization entitled to make those distinctions
is the IRS as an agency...
Very poorly equipped to do that.
I mean, they're mainly accountants and lawyers,
they're not theologians.
But it's the only opinion that matters.
Once the IRS has decided that you are a religion,
then you are protected by the vast protections
of the first amendment.
And, as the saying goes,
the rest is history. On October the first, 1993,
at 8:37 pm eastern standard time,
the IRS issued letters recognizing scientology
and every one of its organizations
as fully tax-exempt! The war is over!
The war ended
because the IRS surrendered.
It forgave the billion-dollar tax bill
and granted scientology its tax exemption.
Even Hubbard's novels were declared religious texts,
their sales exempt from taxes.
What happened is that Fred goldberg,
who was the IRS commissioner at that time...
Miscavige let goldberg know that if we could find a way
to get tax-exempt status,
all those lawsuits will go away overnight.
And as we were going out the door,
Fred goldberg goes, "is he serious?"
And I said, "yeah."
And he sort of breathed this sigh of relief,
kind of nodded, and smiled.
At the church's victory party,
Miscavige projected photos of the church's executives
celebrating with IRS officials.
It created this tremendous juggernaut
of tight conspiracy of the membership that then existed,
but what it really did was enable Miscavige
to milk every last dime
out of that core membership.
I am proud to announce the discrimination is over.
Your tax dona...
Deductions on donations to scientology
will no longer be disallowed by the internal revenue service.
In the '80s, while Hubbard was in hiding,
scientology was going through some very severe litigation,
in particular, a lawsuit in Oregon,
and one in Los Angeles.
One of them did produce a $30 million judgment.
This scared scientology.
They realized they were vulnerable.
And so they asked scientologists,
"okay, give us a few thousand dollars.
"You'll get a nice ribbon or something.
"You're not gonna get any courses from it." And this was new,
the idea that you would give them money
just to defend against lawsuits.
And that grew and grew.
Now scientologists are constantly
under intense pressure just to hand money over.
They pitch themselves as being the underdog,
as being the victim. And you identify with that.
But then they start hitting you up
for bigger donations, and bigger... and I got a lot of pressure.
And I think i donated another $250,000 to them under pressure.
They really know how to do it.
They really know how to do it, and he just was after me and after me.
And they said, "we're under attack, Paul."
This one guy who donated $25 million,
for no... you know, just straight donation,
to this... To the scientology war chest.
Churches are tax-exempt
because they're supposed to provide a public good.
To prove that good to the IRS,
churches aren't supposed to hoard their money.
They're supposed to spend it on services for the faithful.
Under this pretense, the church had made massive investments
in tax-free real estate all over the world.
And when it comes to labor costs,
they are almost free.
The Max I got paid, you know,
on a weekly basis was 50 bucks,
um, for 28 years.
Sea org workers take home something
between six and 40 cents an hour.
So if you've got very low labor costs,
no taxes to pay, and wealthy people giving you donations,
you can see why scientology has amassed huge piles of money.
How much are they worth?
This was a bit of a mystery, but just recently,
I obtained tax records that scientology
does have to turn in.
Three of the main entities of scientology...
And there are 20 or 30 of them...
But the top three, just on their own,
have a book value of $1.5 billion.
It's stunning how much money a nonprofit
has been able to amass.
It is a crime that we've given them religious recognition
and that they can hide behind it.
Meanwhile, you got very good people in there,
and their lives are being destroyed.
When I started this story,
I stumbled across an FBI investigation of the church.
They were investigating human trafficking.
It seemed that people were being confined against their will.
There were lots of reports of people being physically abused,
and the exploitation of labor and child labor.
All of these things were questions that the FBI had.
While that investigation was going on,
a case was being heard in Colorado...
The headleys, who were suing the church
for many of these same violations.
And the court ruled in that case
that these are all essentially practices
that are protected by the religious clause
of the first amendment.
Once that ruling came out,
the FBI dropped its investigation.
I think it was an indication that the church is protected.
Before ending cycle completely on the IRS,
there is one thing i do wish to do.
Sir. Done.
The "we stand tall" thing...
This again was part of this whole IRS thing.
And Miscavige kind of had this song composed
by the musician group they had up at the studio.
He was trying to turn this into...
This was a result of the power of this movement...
Which was such bullshit,
because it was all about control.
When he got absolute control, he went absolutely bonkers.
You know, most religions are tax-exempt
and many have beliefs and practices
that in the modern context would be considered strange.
Is scientology any different?
I mean, if you go to a Christian
or a Jew or a Muslim, and ask them,
"what do you believe?",
they can basically describe
the most important parts of their religion
in a minute or two.
Well, what does a scientologist believe?
You need to be in scientology for seven or eight years,
and in for a couple hundred thousand dollars,
before you finally learn this backstory
of xenu the galactic overlord.
Now, if you were told that on day one,
how many people would join?
But if they were upfront about it,
I'd have more respect for them.
But it's that sort of bait and switch
that people are told, "oh, it's an applied philosophy
"to help you with your communication."
Oh, yeah?
So why is tom cruise paying 1,000 bucks
to have invisible aliens pulled out of his body?
What happens when your zone of influence
is the global stage?
How much must one do to call themselves a scientologist?
How much so that when their head hits the pillow,
they can live with themselves,
knowing they did all they could do?
That is our final story this evening.
It's a story that affects every scientologist,
for all of us are the beneficiaries of what he presents.
Tom cruise was the guy.
Miscavige and cruise had been pretty buddy-buddy,
way back to "days of thunder."
He was on the set with him, he went skydiving with him,
was hangin' out with him all the time.
And that was when tom first met Nicole.
He had really fallen for her.
They got married,
and this posed a dilemma for the church,
because her father
is a well-known psychologist in Australia.
From the church's perspective, he's the enemy.
He's a suppressive person.
How could you ignore me like this?
Because Nicole is still
in a relationship with her father,
that makes her dangerous.
She's a potential trouble source, pts.
And because tom is related to her,
this all causes trouble from the church's perspective.
You have to break that dynamic.
Nicole... her biggest beef
was that tom was becoming increasingly like Dave.
She really got him to drift away from the church,
and tom was not really actively involved in scientology
between '92-ish all the way up until 2001.
They were away for more than a year
shooting "eyes wide shut" in the uk.
And cruise was not in touch with Miscavige,
and this drove Miscavige crazy.
I was assigned to, um, get him back in.
And that was coincident with, and... and I was to facilitate
the breakup with Nicole Kidman.
And how'd you do that?
Uh, well, through a lot of auditing.
And every session i ever gave to tom cruise...
And there was dozens upon dozens of them over a three-year period...
I had to write detailed reports
and send them directly to David Miscavige.
I would sit there every night with our scotch
and watch and listen to Miscavige comment
about cruise's sex life, and what... yeah,
how perverted he was.
Why is he gettin' daily reports on cruise?
Miscavige really wanted to get him back
into being somebody that he could use
to lure people into scientology and increase his own status.
And I was also involved in the legal team
and actually hiring investigators to investigate Nicole.
Men have to stick it in every place they can,
but for women... Women, it is just about
security and commitment...
Tom wanted to know exactly who she was talking to,
and so he wanted to tap her phone.
If you men only knew.
When I reported that day to Miscavige,
I reported it, like, "i mean, he wants to tap her phone."
He said, "God damn it, get it done."
And so I arranged, through the scientology's consigliere,
to get a private investigator
who physically installed a wiretap on her home.
And those tapes would come in,
and I forwarded them to Dave Miscavige.
The church then turned its attention
to their adopted children, to turn them against their mother
and make sure that the custody went to tom.
Tommy Davis, he was my liaison
who had to do all the things that are required
to please tom cruise
while he was being put through the scientology hoops by me.
He also was part of this whole reeducation program,
so that they would conclude that their mother
was a suppressive person.
And that was successful.
It was all going according to plan.
And of course, Miscavige would really
pump the oxygen into that little fire, you know.
Miscavige was brilliant at flaming people's fears,
and building up their egos.
So you were being audited by Marty
at the same time he was auditing cruise?
Oh, yeah, yeah, I was... Yeah, tom cruise.
Tom would go in, and I would go in, and tom would go in,
and I would go in, and so, you know...
And I had been audited by the best auditors on the planet.
The best auditor, hands down,
I mean, like... Like kinda Michael Jordan,
Wayne gretsky, kinda auditor is Marty.
They stole him, you know?
Tom thinks he's supposed to be David Miscavige.
By 2004, tom cruise was the most gung-ho scientologist in the world,
and Miscavige wanted to recognize him for it.
He called it the freedom medal of valor
and they put together this 35-minute video.
Ias freedom medal of valor winner, tom cruise!
In it, they just pump up this idea
that tom cruise is the ambassador of scientology to the world.
He's known as the biggest movie star ever.
Tom cruise travels this world,
meeting with ministers, ambassadors,
and the American state department,
advancing lrh technology straight into the corridors of power.
It's about improving conditions.
It allows you to find out for yourself.
There's things that we can do to help.
They even did a calculation,
where they figured between his films
and all the "opinion leaders" that he had met
and all the travel he had done...
Tom cruise has introduced lrh technology
to over one billion people of earth.
No question, he has been a huge asset to them.
Which is why the story of tom cruise,
scientologist, has only just begun.
I think it's a privilege to call yourself a scientologist,
and it's something that you have to earn.
Scientology loves to use this word "end phenomena."
Every level has an end phenomena,
you know, that you attain,
and tom cruise shows that.
That video with him in the black turtleneck sweater?
A scientologist is someone who can look at the world
and really see what it is.
Not only look at it and see it, but be able to go,
poof, and be effective, and do something about it.
And he's as arrogant and as untouchable
as could possibly be.
At the same time, he looks like an utter crazy paranoiac.
And, uh... I know... you know, she...
They, said, "so, like have you met an sp?"
And I looked at her,
and I thought, "oh, what a beautiful thing,"
because maybe one day, it'll be like that.
You know what I'm saying? Maybe one day,
it will be that... "Wow. Sp's?"
Like, they'll just read about those
in the history books, you know?
That's where it takes you.
That's the end phenomena of the scientology bridge.
All scientologists are full of shit.
You know, they lie. "Aw, I'm doing great!
"You gotta get on seven."
You know, and they're fucking...
"I've got a fucking migraine right now,
"and I've never felt so shitty!"
You know, that's the fucking life.
There's nothing part of the way for me!
It's just... whoo!
He drank the kool-aid.
And in the eyes of Miscavige,
tom cruise is the perfect scientology celebrity.
And nobody's benefited more from his membership.
I mean, the amount of free sea org labor.
Sea org members make 40 cents an hour,
and I don't think there's any way
tom cruise is not aware of that.
The church has done so much for him.
They tricked out all his cars and his motorcycles.
"Oh, I want a new limo." "We'll build it for you."
Decked out tom cruise's hangar in Santa Monica.
Installed all the audiovisual stuff in cruise's home.
Tom cruise had expressed this fantasy
of wanting to run through a meadow with Nicole Kidman.
And so everybody had to work, and till the soil.
And then David Miscavige didn't like it,
and so the whole thing had to be ripped up again.
This was at the gold facility,
which is this desert facility,
where this is all kinds of great stuff,
if you're tom cruise, you know?
Wonderful living quarters and a gym.
When cruise comes up, everyone's told in advance,
"you better have a fucking smile on your face."
Everyone had to call cruise "sir."
Thank you.
It's this side-by-side world.
There are celebrities like cruise and Travolta,
and then, you know, there are people
who tell terrible tales of what happened to them in the church...
Being imprisoned and really horrible psychological games.
Tom was in Spain.
They were opening up a new scientology church in Madrid.
And he was overheard to complain
that he needed a new girlfriend.
Soon after that, a young scientologist premed student
named nazanin boniadi... She was told
that she was going to get a special assignment.
Number of transactions increase...
Years later, nazanin became a successful TV actress
and she would have a small part in a Paul Haggis film.
But at the time, she was a dedicated young scientologist
who believed in the church's claims
for its humanitarian mission.
In fact, she set a monthly record
for selling books for the church.
Nazanin may not speak publicly about her experiences
because of an nda the church pressured her to sign,
but I discovered details from FBI testimony
regarding her ordeal.
David Miscavige assigned nazanin's case
to a key church official, Greg wilhere.
He put her through a one-month program
of on-camera interviews, intensive auditing, and security checks.
She was moved into the celebrity center,
separated from her family, and certain problems were addressed
during this period of time.
One was, she had a boyfriend.
She is handed a transcript of his auditing session,
in which he admitted that he had an affair.
And so she broke up with him.
Then wilhere took her to an orthodontist
to have her braces removed.
At burberry and other stores in Beverly hills,
he bought her $20,000 worth of clothes.
At the celebrity centre, a man who worked
for cruise's hair stylist
colored nazanin's hair to cruise's liking.
Nazanin was told that her makeover
was a part of the church's humanitarian mission.
She had to look her best for conferences with world leaders.
Only after she was flown first class to New York
did she discover the actual role
that the church wanted her to play.
She was to be the girlfriend of scientology's biggest star.
Within a month, nazanin was living with cruise.
While at his house in Telluride,
Miscavige came to visit.
Overcome by a severe headache,
nazanin had a hard time understanding Miscavige,
which infuriated him.
The next day, cruise, inches from her face,
pounded his fist on the table and screamed at her
for insulting the head of the church.
Two weeks later, church henchman Tommy Davis
delivered the news to nazanin...
The relationship with cruise was over.
And they, according to her,
came to her apartment with her mom
and found every photograph of the two of them together,
and took them away. Every scrap, every letter, everything,
they... As if it never existed.
And she was really upset,
because she had been really hurt by the whole thing.
And she made the mistake of telling her friend,
who immediately went to tell someone in the church.
She agreed to do punishments,
like cleaning out the public bathrooms
on her hands and knees with a toothbrush,
while other people she knew were stepping over her.
She did nothing wrong, other than tell her friend
that she was heartbroken, and this is the way she was treated?
The church claims that Miscavige has no involvement
in cruise's personal life
and that the search for cruise's girlfriend never existed.
I wanna tell you something.
I have never met a more competent,
a more intelligent, a more tolerant,
a more compassionate being,
outside of what I've experienced from lrh.
And I've met the leaders of leaders.
Okay? I've met them all.
And so I say to you, sir, cob,
we are lucky to have you and thank you very much.
While Miscavige would do anything
for the church's most famous celebrity,
Miscavige began to turn against
the sea org's highest-ranking executives.
He pretty much had international management shut down.
He was into this deep paranoia thing
about everybody is out to get him.
He very definitely
wiped out that organizational pattern
in order to be able to have ultimate power.
In 2004,
Miscavige ordered the top officers of the sea org
to the scientology's gold base
in Southern California.
He forced them to live in a pair of double-wide trailers
that came to be called "the hole."
The doors had bars put on them,
the windows all had bars put on them,
and there was one entrance door
that a security guard sat at 24 hours a day.
They had to stay there, sleep there.
It stunk and, you know, there were ants crawling around.
You'd sleep about an hour or two hours a night.
Um, you were in such a mental state
that you're very controllable, very suggestible.
We were told we needed to come up
with what each other's crimes were
against Miscavige and Hubbard,
so that we could eventually get out of the hole.
Scientology is really good
at making you think that you are a scoundrel.
"Confess your crimes! Confess your crimes! What have you done?"
Fights would break out.
Miscavige would get me all riled up.
And I remember one time, Mike had done something,
or not done something, i don't remember,
and I was supposed to go beat him up.
One executive was made to mop up
the bathroom floor with his tongue.
Another was put into a bucket,
and pummeled by some of the women, and called a lesbian.
There was a very powerful air conditioner,
which blew straight down,
it was set on maximum cold,
and a guy was made to sit in a chair,
and had water poured on his head
until he literally turned blue.
Miscavige slapped me across the face,
knocked me on the ground, kicked me a couple times.
Flailing fists, kneeing him in the stomach,
getting him on the floor.
And you think, you want to get up and retaliate,
but you also think, "i got 75 other people
"who are all likely to tackle me if I did"...
And then you got the sheer shock of it.
Here's the equivalent of the pope
suddenly knocking you on the ground,
and you're thinking,
"i must have really screwed up."
It was a poisonous environment.
People were really frightened.
And this went on for years.
This isn't a couple of days.
The nominal president of the church,
this man named heber jentszch,
he was in there for seven years.
What is the statement?
"God helps those who help themselves."
Well, in scientology, we're engaged
in helping people help themselves,
so they can fully comprehend and understand God.
One night,
Miscavige comes into the hole with a boom box.
He said, "I'm gonna teach you all a lesson.
"We're all gonna play musical chairs."
And musical chairs is a scientology
administrative term for when you move people
from different posts rapidly, and you create instability.
They played the damned music.
He said, "we're gonna play it
to 'bohemian rhapsody' by queen."
And he emphasized the line...
"Nothing matters anymore." And that's your whole attitude,
that's where you live, that's who you are.
Playing that music, and stop it,
and everyone would have to grab a chair.
And there's one person left standing.
What Miscavige has warned them
is that the last person who remains gets to stay.
"Everybody else, you're expelled.
"You're going to be thrown out of the sea org."
These people were fighting to stay in the hole.
Throwing people around, scratching, kicking.
They're tearing chairs apart, they're ripping clothing.
And whatever it took.
But then nothing happens.
"Out of the goodness of my heart, you can stay.
"But you better come clean. You better...
"I better have some good confessions out of you."
I... I mean, you... You know...
As much as they get into everything that you ever think or do,
they never got into my think on this score,
that I would never go to prison.
And so it was inevitable, when I got... when I...
He literally created this prison camp.
Um, it was inevitable that I wasn't gonna last there.
It's embarrassing to have ever been involved with,
to think about it.
"God, I can't even believe I'm talkin' about it."
But it was bad.
Let's say the FBI showed up at the hole,
and said, "this is the FBI. We're lettin' everyone out."
Do you think everyone would have said, "oh, thank God, the FBI's here"?
No. I think that everybody, one for one,
would have gone, "what do you mean?
"We... we're doing this voluntarily.
"We like living in these conditions."
Over the past week,
we've been reporting on allegations of physical abuse
inside the church of scientology.
We spoke with the ex-wives of some of the men
making the claims of abuse.
I read all of your affidavits.
Obviously, your ex-husbands have made charges
against David Miscavige,
saying that they have seen repeated acts of physical violence
perpetrated by Mr. Miscavige.
Is... is any of that true?
No. No. Not one ounce of it.
That's not the character of Mr. David Miscavige.
My ex-wife, Marty rathbun's ex-wife,
tom de vocht's ex-wife, that were on "Anderson Cooper,"
they all came out of the hole!
They were all sent there to do that.
They went back to the hole!
It's just ridiculous.
This line that my ex-wife said...
I lived with Mike rinder for over 35 years.
I know every square inch of Mike rinder's body.
She said it because she was told to say it by Miscavige.
And the proof of that is, when tom de vocht's ex-wife
then repeated the same thing over again...
I know every inch of him.
You gotta be kidding me!
Everything that happens
from the church of scientology is scripted.
Don't ever turn the other cheek and acquiesce,
hit 'em back.
Marty rathbun suddenly went and leapt on top of Mike rinder
and fought him to the ground
and started choking him and beating him.
And nothing seems to have been done about it.
Mr. Miscavige was not at the property at the time.
Do you not have telephones?
Of course we have telephones.
I think you're being quite rude and quite insulting.
Here's the bottom line. Here's the bottom line...
There is no history of violence in the church.
As somebody who ran PR for the church for a long time,
do you have any regret for anything that you did in that capacity?
Well, I think the biggest regret
is when John sweeney at "panorama" was doing his program,
it was the culmination of a lot...
I mean, I'd been in the hole for a year.
And I ended up being sent to england.
Hi, Mike. He was constantly going,
"well, why do you have private investigators following me?"
I'm like... That never happened!
Ever, ever happened!
And of course there were.
I was following John sweeney.
Oh, there it is.
Okay, there we are.
He's got his camera,
he's standing there and he's saying,
"i want a response. I have credible witnesses.
"Did David Miscavige physically assault you?"
And I said...
Those allegations are absolute, utter rubbish.
Absolute, utter rubbish.
You have been assaulted by Miscavige?
Many times, many times.
Perhaps more than anybody else.
I was now sort of
at the end of my rope.
It was a real moment of clarity for me...
"I don't want to be doing this anymore.
"This is nuts!"
That was actually the last thing that I did before I left.
So I'd been in scientology about two and a half years.
I am kickin' ass.
I felt like I had gotten out of the fuckin' trap.
I didn't have to have a problem.
I said, "I'm done with auditing."
But they insisted on gettin' me back,
and said just, "believe us, believe us, believe us."
I got so fucked up.
I mean, they... they... I went insane.
I was, like, stuck somewhere
in a tiny spot behind my eyeballs,
looking this way.
I mean, I... I'd never experienced anything like it.
10 fuckin' years!
I was worse than the day that I walked in.
It was by design, 'cause they needed to...
To keep me in there.
So basically, they had to
put a whole new case on me, so they could run it.
And they just kept tryin' to fuckin' keep me stuck in.
It was crazy!
So I finally said, "I'm going my way. You guys go yours."
I was pissed. I was sad. I was disillusioned.
And I thought, "maybe somebody could interview me,
"ask me some questions about scientology."
How I got into scientology, and why I got out.
Post this two-hour thing,
and it was the ♪1 thing on YouTube for two days
before it "mysteriously" disappeared.
The best traps...
You get a guy to just keep himself in jail.
Right? And that's what scientology does.
I started getting all this communication
because of that video.
You know, "you saved my family."
You know, "you've... I finally had the courage
"to leave after I watched your thing."
You know? I mean, like, there's blood and tears.
And then I started to find out,
you know, all the stuff that was really happening.
You know, I lost money, i got fucked,
but then I found out about the abuse in the sea org.
And I felt like, "fuck me, i gotta do somethin' about it."
And I finally tracked down Marty rathbun.
Everybody thought he was dead.
He was in fuckin' Mexico. And I went down there,
and I basically convinced him to talk.
And, like, "we gotta do somethin'."
And then he started his blog.
There was a beating every day.
And if it wasn't him doin' it,
it was from him inciting others to do it to others.
I think that it's a cult.
I'm doin' my own thing, i want to get on with my life.
I am telling the truth.
Suddenly I heard senior members of the church
were speaking out,
so I started to look, and I started to read.
And then I started to reach out to people.
Two of my daughters are gay, and told me
how they'd been treated within the church. I didn't know.
Paul Haggis's daughters were openly harassed
by church members for being gay.
Investigating further, Haggis discovered
that church doctrine viewed homosexuality as a disease
that only Hubbard's teachings could cure.
And a California chapter of scientology
had supported a ban on gay marriage.
I can't be part of an organization
that doesn't support
human rights for everyone.
So I sent a letter to 25 friends in the church
that I was resigning.
And I'd hoped they'd read this letter
and be horrified by the things I'd found out.
A few days later, I drive home.
There have to be 10 people standing in my front yard.
I recognize them. They're my friends.
They said, "Paul, we need you to tear up this letter.
"And we need you to get all the copies and tear them up,
"and resign quietly."
I said, "i don't do that." You know?
"I'm sorry. I don't do that."
I sent a copy to Marty rathbun.
He put it on his blog, one page on a day,
and didn't reveal my name until the Friday.
Monday morning, I woke up.
600 of the top newspapers of the world had it.
You know, it was in Bulgaria.
I mean, it was reprinted in seven languages.
I went, "oh my God, what have I done?"
I mean... it did garner a lot of interest.
People will judge you, one way or the other.
I figured people would judge me as really stupid.
But then, I was really stupid.
I was a part of this for 30 years before i spoke out.
I felt deeply ashamed.
Why didn't I do it earlier? Why didn't I look earlier?
People are so indoctrinated,
and have been in scientology a really long, long time.
Or they've grown up in it, and they don't know anything else.
It's so scary to them to have to start all over,
and it takes a really strong person
to stand up to them and say no.
In 2009,
my son was on staff at the church.
And "the truth rundown" came out in the "St. Pete times,"
exposing what was going on
with the beatings, people in the hole.
The church was very mad at my son,
because he knew it was going to happen,
and he didn't tell them.
And he didn't tell them because he had a good friend
that became friends with Mike rinder
and Marty rathbun,
and he believed what they were saying in "the truth rundown."
The church was threatening,
that he was gonna get declared a suppressive person
if he didn't disconnect from his friend.
My son, he was raised a scientologist,
you know, and he'd been on staff.
He made 30 bucks a week.
He headed up their boy scout troop.
He was like this consummate youth of scientology.
The continental justice chief called him on the phone.
And it was after that the declare came down,
and he was just devastated.
The church told his friends everything they could find
in his pc folder to ruin his reputation.
I wrote this petition.
I tried to put in everything good that my son had done.
"Dear Sarah, thank you for the letter
"that you sent regarding the situation with Nick lister.
"I cannot approve that you continue your connection with Nick."
No one's gonna tell me when I can and can't speak to him.
No one, but me.
"Your committee of evidence findings and recommendations
"recommended you be labeled suppressive,
"engaging in malicious rumor mongering
"to destroy the authority or repute of higher officers
"or the leading names of scientology."
My husband was charged with that one,
because he was telling me
what he read on the Internet about David Miscavige.
They say, "don't go on the Internet, don't read.
"Don't go to these sites."
From the time that I got in,
for 30 years, I never read one critical thing about scientology.
When I finally decided to open my eyes and look,
I was shocked, just shocked.
But if you're a member of the church of scientology,
and someone in your family, or a friend, or your spouse,
is skeptical or critical of the church of scientology,
you are supposed to disconnect yourself from that person...
Tommy Davis, who was the spokesperson for the church,
he's being asked about the policy of disconnection.
Anything that's characterized as disconnection
or this kinda thing, it's just... it's just not true.
There isn't... I confronted him about this.
And I said, "Tommy, I don't need to search outside to ask for...
"To check research and see if other...
"This has happened to other people. This happened to my wife.
"You asked her and me to disconnect from her parents
"because of something trivial they did years ago."
My wife disconnected from me,
my daughter, my son, my brother,
my sister, my mother,
all of my nieces and nephews.
And that is the only family that I have.
You know, you label these people suppressive
so that, you know, everybody automatically...
They're discredited, and they must disconnect from them.
And that's how you keep people in a bubble.
And that's what they do. I mean, my son was declared
because he wouldn't disconnect from his friend.
I was declared, and my husband was declared
because we wouldn't disconnect from my son.
And now guess what happened?
Everyone connected to us just scatters to the wind.
Through all of this time,
I have a daughter who's very much into the church.
I have a granddaughter
who's the love of my life, and who loves her Nana.
I was planning on talking to my daughter,
and trying to tell her what was really happening.
She hugged me, she told me she loved me.
She said, "i have to disconnect from you."
So, um...
I just was concentrating on smelling her hair
and seeing the way she felt,
touching her skin on my face.
That's the last time I saw them.
It really is the crux
of how controlling is any religion
over its adherents,
and scientology has perfected
a lot of techniques of control.
There is no logical explanation
as to why, other than faith.
Your future, your eternity,
all depends on you going up the bridge.
It's scary. It's kinda like christianity with hell.
If they don't have the bridge, they can't go free.
They don't believe they can get it anywhere else.
It's like brainwashing. Really simple.
I mean, that's a scary word,
and it took me a long time
to come to that conclusion, that that's what's occurred.
You take on
a kind of a... A matrix of thought
that is not your own.
I think that's how i and other people got involved
and stuck through it for so long.
Because when you're out, you look at it,
and you go, "what the crap was I thinking," you know?
It's such a hard thing when you do wake up.
You go, "oh my God."
Because you have this wave of regrets.
I just started to think that maybe my entire life
has been a lie.
You just don't see it happening to you.
You justify so much.
Cults, they prey on people, suggesting that, you know,
you should be able to think for yourself
and then tell you exactly how you have to think, or get out.
And if you get out, there will be consequences.
Come on, Marty. Got anything to say?
What's your name? Why don't you answer his question?
Beat it. I said get off my property, boy.
The real sustained campaign
began in early 2009
when I spoke to the "St. Petersburg times."
And I'd been hounded and hunted like wild prey.
It's a policy of the office of special affairs
authored by l. Ron Hubbard.
When somebody's speaking out against scientology,
investigate to find out who the instigator is.
I started getting calls from the church,
and they're... they're really, uh, comin' after me.
They showed up at my mother's house.
The feeling in the pit of your stomach
knowing that scientology's chief dirty-tricks pi
was just on my mother's front step.
They've tried to destroy me, there's no question.
They create anonymous websites about me,
and smear me with a lot of garbage.
www.Whoistomdevocht.Com.
WhoispaulHaggis.Com.
"Paul Haggis, the hypocrite of Hollywood."
"This guy is a sex pervert," or "this guy's a drug dealer."
In the meantime,
survey carefully to find out what he most values and protects.
Immediately draw up a three-prong program
to threaten it effectively.
I don't value anything more than Monique.
That's why this campaign ended up on our doorstep.
Was she there?
I knew they had their goons around.
And then the guy rolls down in window and I saw the truck.
And he starts filming, and I go,
"okay, this is not good."
What's goin' on?
Oh, we're just doing a documentary.
A documentary?
Oh, a former scientology deal.
But it would probably be a good idea if y'all went ahead...
Now that you've gotten what you need,
go ahead and leave the area. Sure.
Okay?
I don't know who these people are.
I don't know what they're capable of.
And now that I have my son...
I have a little louisville slugger i keep next to me.
It's been a nonstop onslaught, for five years.
I told you to leave. Get out of here.
Oh no, I'm leaving.
You can't even defend yourself on this can you?
What's your name?
I gave you my name, Marty. What's your name?
Marty, I gave you my name.
The people on Marty’s doorstep were sent by scientology
because the church had branded Marty a "squirrel,"
a term invented by Hubbard for former members
who threatened church teachings.
David Miscavige had you come all the way from...
Marty. San Jose.
Marty! Man ♪2: You can't do that.
You can't do that, Marty! I just did it.
No, that's my personal property, Marty.
Yeah, that's right.
I got arrested, man.
I got arrested for grabbing this guy's glasses.
I said, "don't look at her." You understand that?
Yeah. I heard her.
Of course, the guy had been stalking Monique for two years.
He looks like a leering pervert,
like Norman bates from "psycho."
I didn't break his glasses.
I just removed them from his... from his face.
They got it all on videotape from their surveillance house
that was filming 24/7, 365,
for five years, across the street from us.
This lawsuit with Monique rathbun...
It's a brilliant legal strategy.
If Marty sues, the church just says,
"this is a first amendment fight.
"This should not be in a court of law."
But Monique was never in scientology.
She's suing David Miscavige and asking to depose him.
And scientology will do anything to keep him out of that situation.
And the point is, judge,
if you let me make my presentation,
on first amendment law
that comes from the United States supreme court...
For every court date,
the church hires a bevy of high-priced lawyers.
They are determined to use every legal trick in the book
to keep Miscavige from having to testify
about church abuses or whether the religion of scientology
is actually operated like a business,
controlled by the whims of a single individual.
In 2014, Miscavige celebrated
the ongoing expansion of the church,
but he was hiding a terrible secret.
Good evening!
The church's active membership has dropped
to fewer than 50,000 people,
yet the financial value of scientology is soaring.
How about we just say,
2013 is the year we went stratospheric?
The church is making investments
and buying valuable real estate all over the world.
That financial clout gives scientology enormous power.
It's a kind of tax-free shell company
growing past $3 billion in assets.
The church now no longer has a public face.
There's no spokespeople,
they don't do media interviews,
and that suits Miscavige.
There is nobody that he is willing
to have be the face of scientology other than himself,
but he's afraid to be interviewed by anybody
for fear that they're gonna ask him questions
that he can't answer, or doesn't want to answer.
Where are the checks and balances on his power?
There is none.
So there are two things that could happen.
One is, the IRS would reconsider its tax exemption.
The only other thing is that some of these celebrity megaphones
could turn against the church.
And tom cruise should be leading that chorus.
Is there anything that you look back on,
in terms of your own career in the church,
and think, "wow, i wish I hadn't done that?"
You know, we talked about karma earlier.
And, you know, it still happens that it's like it's just this...
I constantly get presented with who I was,
and, you know, and I constantly don't like what I see,
and I sort of constantly keep dying deaths.
Um, and...
I don't know how many more deaths I have left,
but I... but I...
But I regret
and I'm ashamed of, uh...
The entire experience, you know?
What I take away from it is that we...
We lock up a portion of our own mind.
We... we willingly put cuffs on.
We willingly avoid things
that will... Could cause us pain,
if we just... If we looked.
If we can just believe something,
then we don't have to really think for ourselves, do we?
And so I can't damn these people who aren't coming out,
or who are hiding once they come out because they're ashamed.
You know, I...
I... I feel the same shame.
And I just... I'm fighting back
by communicating, you know? It's a peaceful protest.
I want the truth to be known,
and...
Thank you.
You're welcome.
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