Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

The situation was much less restrained belowdecks. The Sea Org members were young and vigorous; sexual escapades were routine, and marriages quite fluid. Hubbard seemed to be oblivious, but Mary Sue was increasingly scandalized. When she learned that a crew member, who was nineteen or twenty, had slept with a fifteen-year-old girl on the ship, she got a dagger out of her cabin and held it against his throat and told him he had to be off the ship in two hours or else. In 1971, on New Year’s Eve, there was a drunken orgy of historic proportions. “Maybe a hundred Sea Org members were having sex everywhere from the topside boatdecks to the lowest holds of the ship,” one of the participants recalled. Mary Sue had had enough. With two attractive teenage daughters of her own on the ship, she started cracking down on premarital sex. Hubbard observed that 1972 was a leap year, and said that any woman on the ship could propose to any man, leading to a sudden rash of weddings. Hubbard had forbidden babies on board, but so many women were getting pregnant that he began permitting the children to stay, rather than sending their parents to another post. The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be “off-loaded” to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.