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

by Lawrence Wright

Mary Sue lost her last appeal. She began serving a five-year sentence in Lexington, Kentucky, in January 1983. Hubbard never visited her in prison. Her letters went unanswered. “I don’t believe he’s getting them,” she later reasoned. Mary Sue was released after serving one year. She never saw her husband again.

Gold Base was the only place deemed secure enough for Brennan to send his dispatches. Brennan says that in late 1982 he witnessed Miscavige abusing three Scientology executives who had made some small error. The three offenders were lined up before their leader. According to Brennan, he punched the first one in the mouth. The next he slapped hard in the face. He choked the third executive so hard that Brennan thought the man would black out. No explanation was offered. This came at a time when Hubbard was furious that his legal situation left him in limbo, and he was upset about the church’s finances. Brennan had access to all the correspondence coming from Hubbard to the Watchdog Committee, and he knew that Hubbard was demanding action. “He wanted a head on a pike,” Brennan said.

Brennan says that after the beating, the three executives were held as prisoners on the base.3 They were assigned lowly tasks and Sea Org members spat on them whenever they passed. Later, one of the three men approached Brennan, in tears, worried about what might happen to him. “He had to have great courage just to speak to me, because they were not allowed to speak unless spoken to,” Brennan recalled. “I had Hubbard’s orders in my hand to spit on him. I couldn’t do it.”

On a Friday afternoon, the judge announced that the OT III documents would be made public at nine a.m. the following Monday, on a first-come, first-serve basis. This was the disaster the church had been dreading. When the courthouse opened that Monday, there were fifteen hundred Scientologists lined up. They filled three hallways of the courthouse and overwhelmed the clerk’s office with requests to photocopy the documents in order to keep anyone else from getting their hands on the confidential materials. They kept it up until the judge issued a restraining order at noon, pending a hearing later in the week. Despite these efforts, the Los Angeles Times managed to get a copy of the OT III materials and published a summary of them. “A major cause of mankind’s problems began 75 million years ago,” the Times account begins. In a studiously neutral tone, the lengthy article reveals Scientology’s occult cosmology. The planet Earth, formerly called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. Although the details were sketchy, the secrets that had stunned Paul Haggis were suddenly public knowledge. The jury awarded Wollersheim $30 million.4 Worse than the financial loss was the derision that greeted the church all over the world and the loss of control of its secret doctrines. The church has never recovered from the blow.

For the first time, much of Hubbard’s biography came under attack. The litigant said that Hubbard had been portrayed as a nuclear physicist and civil engineer. The evidence showed that he attended George Washington University but never graduated. In response to Hubbard’s claim that he had cured himself of his injuries in the Second World War, the evidence showed he had never been wounded. Other embarrassing revelations came to light. The church stated that Hubbard was paid less than the average Scientology staff member—at the time, about fifteen dollars a week—but witnesses for the plaintiff testified that in one six-month period in 1982, about $34 million had been transferred from the church into Hubbard’s personal bank from a Liberian corporation.

That evening, Miscavige and other members of the church hierarchy had a gloomy meeting in a condo in Portland, Oregon. One of the executives vowed that Christofferson Titchbourne would never collect because he was going to kill her. “I don’t care if I get the chair,” he said. “It’s only one lifetime.” There was a lengthy silence, and then Miscavige said, “No, here’s what we’re going to do.” And on the spot, he came up with the Portland crusade. As many as 12,000 Scientologists came from all over the world in May and June 1985 to protest the judgment in what they called the Battle of Portland. Day after day they marched around the Multnomah County courthouse, shouting “Religious freedom now!” and carrying banners reading WE SHALL OVERCOME! Chick Corea flew in from Japan to play a concert, along with other musicians affiliated with the church, including Al Jarreau, Stanley Clarke, and Edgar Winter. Stevie Wonder phoned in and sang “I Just Called to Say I Love You” as the crowd cheered.

The most notable presence in Portland was John Travolta. It was a decisive moment in his relationship with the religion. The church had made enormous efforts to persuade him to attend. Two years before the Portland crusade, Travolta had told Rolling Stone that although he still believed in Scientology, he had not had any auditing for the past year and a half. When asked if he was being exploited by the church to promote its cause, he responded, “I’ve been something of an ostrich about how it’s used me, because I haven’t investigated exactly what the organization’s done. One part of me says that if somebody gets some good out of it, maybe it’s all right. The other part of me says that I hope it uses some taste and discretion. I wish I could defend Scientology better, but I don’t think it even deserves to be defended, in a sense.” But here he was in Portland, unshaven and exhausted, having flown his own plane in at midnight for a two-hour visit. “Once in a while you have to stand up for what you believe in, and I’m here tonight, I’ve had counseling, I give counseling, and I don’t want to lose that,” he declared. “And it’s as simple as that.”

FOR YEARS, Hubbard’s declining health was a secret known to few in the upper levels of the church. Only a handful of his closest followers were allowed to see him. He had made no clear arrangements for a successor, nor was there any open talk of it. There was an unstated belief that Operating Thetans did not grow frail or lose their mental faculties. Old age and illness were embarrassing refutations of Scientology’s core beliefs. Death was a subject that Hubbard rarely addressed, assuring Scientologists that it was of little importance:

Hubbard suffered a severe stroke on January 16, 1986, at the Creston ranch. He realized that he was in his final days. He summoned Ray Mithoff, one of his most senior Messengers, to help him put his affairs in order and administer a “death assist.” He didn’t ask to see any of his family members; indeed, one of his last actions was to sign a will reducing their inheritance, except for a provision for Mary Sue, who received $1 million, which may have been a part of the agreement that had kept her from testifying against him. He had previously disowned his daughter Alexis, an embarrassing reminder of his bigamous marriage to Sara Northrup. Hubbard was in a nightgown, pacing up and down, saying, “Let’s get this over with! My head is hurting!” He signed the will with a shaky hand.

On Friday evening, January 24, 1986, Hubbard died in the Blue Bird bus that had served as his living quarters for the past three years. Ray Mithoff, Pat Broeker, and Hubbard’s personal physician, Eugene Denk, were at his side, along with a handful of acolytes and employees. His body had suffered the usual insults of old age, along with the consequences of obesity and a lifetime of heavy smoking. Dr. Denk had given him injections of Vistaril, a tranquilizer, usually prescribed for anxiety. Whatever powers Scientology was supposed to bestow were no more evident in the death of its founder than they had been in his life.

There was another problem that had to be dealt with quickly: how to explain Hubbard’s death to Scientologists. Broeker and Miscavige came up with a plan: Hubbard didn’t die, he had intentionally “dropped his body” in order to move on to a higher level of existence. Miscavige told one of the other executives he didn’t want to see “any grief bullshit.” Sinar Parman, Hubbard’s former chef, arrived that morning, to help with cooking and logistics. He found Annie Broeker sitting on the floor of the cabin, with Miscavige’s wife, Shelly. Annie had obviously been crying. Meanwhile, he noticed Miscavige and Broeker in another room. “They were joking,” he recalled. “They were ecstatic. They’d never been so happy.” That Sunday, Hubbard’s ashes were scattered in the Pacific.

and trim, with brown hair and sharp features, Miscavige announced to the assembled Scientologists that for the past six years of exile, Hubbard had been investigating new, higher OT levels. “He has now moved on to the next level,” Miscavige said. “It’s beyond anything any of us has imagined. This level is, in fact, done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body.” Someone in the audience whistled in amazement. “At this level of OT, the body is nothing more than an impediment, an encumbrance to any further gain as an OT.” The audience began to stir as the realization began to sink in. “Thus—,” Miscavige said, then paused and adjusted the microphone. “Thus, at two thousand hours, Friday, the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36 [that is, thirty-six years after the publication of Dianetics], L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime for seventy-four years, ten months, and eleven days.” Miscavige turned to a large photograph of Admiral Hubbard with the waves behind him and began to applaud. “Hip, hip, hooray!” he cried, as the audience echoed him. “Hip, hip, hooray!”

Three days later, John Colletto’s decomposing body was found. He had slashed his wrists and bled to death on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway. Because of this incident, Rathbun was singled out for his fearlessness, or what Scientology terms his “high level of confront.” Soon after that, he was sent to La Quinta, Hubbard’s winter headquarters, where the old man was just then building up his moviemaking enterprise. Miscavige had appointed Rathbun head of what was known as the “All Clear” unit. The object was to resolve the dozens of lawsuits around the country that had named Hubbard as a defendant. He was also the target of grand juries in Tampa, New York, and Washington, DC. Hubbard wanted to be able to return to his moviemaking full-time, but he was afraid to show himself until he was assured that he wouldn’t be hauled into court. (He died before that happened.)

Miscavige concentrated his attention on Annie. He took her to a separate room and interrogated her as a detective barred the door, preventing her husband from seeing her. Eventually, Annie admitted that Pat kept a storage locker in nearby Paso Robles, and she coughed up the key. Rathbun’s team found more files, but not what they wanted. Rathbun eventually came to the conclusion that there were no further OT levels—no OT IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV—it was all a bluff on Broeker’s part, a lie that the church would have to live with, since the levels had been so publicly announced.8 In April 1988, Miscavige formally canceled Hubbard’s final directive, Flag Order 3879, that had named the Broekers Loyal Officers. Miscavige declared that Pat Broeker had fabricated the order, although he produced no evidence to substantiate his charge. Broeker’s last claim to the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard was destroyed. He fled the country, followed by two private detectives, Paul Marrick and Greg Arnold, who claim that they tailed Broeker for the next twenty-four years, even to foreign countries. They say they were supervised personally by David Miscavige and paid from church funds. “He lived a very quiet, normal life, and everybody around him loves him,” Marrick later said of Broeker. “So that’s his whole story from our perspective.”

DESPITE HIS EXUBERANT TESTIMONIAL, Haggis was increasingly troubled by the contradictions in the church. Scientology had begun to seem like two different things: a systematic approach to self-knowledge, which he found useful and insightful; and a religion that he simply couldn’t grasp. He liked and admired his auditor, and the confessions were helpful, and he continued to advance on the Bridge, even after his unsettling encounter with OT III. He saw so many intelligent people on the path, and he always expected that his concerns would be addressed at the next level. They never were. After OT III, it was all “intergalactic spirituality,” in his opinion. On the other hand, he had already paid for the complete package, so why not continue and see what happened? “Maybe there is something, and I’m missing it,” he told himself.

After Suzette blew, Guy recalls being sent to Happy Valley and being told he would have to divorce his wife. Jonathan Horwich, Roanne’s father, was also in Happy Valley, along with Arthur Hubbard, Ron and Mary Sue’s youngest child. One night, while Horwich was supposed to be standing guard, Arthur blew and was never recovered. In October 1988, Guy also decided to escape. Each evening, he went for a stroll along the fence line, a little farther each time, carrying a snack for the German shepherd guard dogs. One night, he jumped the fence, but the dogs betrayed him and began barking. He had to dive off the road when he saw the lights of the blow team coming after him. For hours, he stumbled through the brush, bleeding, his clothes torn, until he made it to Hemet, where he pounded on the door of a bowling alley. In broken Spanish, he told the person who peeked out that he had been in a car wreck. Guy finally rejoined Suzette. (They had two other children before he came out to her as gay. They divorced in 1998.)

Rogers later said that she and Cruise were already having difficulty in their marriage. He had been seriously thinking about becoming a monk, in which case marriage wouldn’t fit into his plans. “He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument,” she told Playboy. “Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.”

An ex-marine named Andre Tabayoyon, who oversaw construction of the security at the Gold Base, later testified that church funds were used to purchase assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols; he also said that explosive devices were placed around the perimeter to be used in case of assault by law enforcement officials. Surrounded by a security fence with three-inch spikes, patrolled by armed guards, and monitored by cameras, motion detectors, infrared scanners, and a sniper’s nest at the top of a hill, the property houses about eight hundred Sea Org members, in conditions that the church describes as “like one would find in a convent or seminary, albeit much more comfortable.”

At any time, a fleeing member could guarantee his safety by simply calling the police, but that rarely if ever happened. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, whose jurisdiction includes Gold Base, says that there has never been an outcry of abuse, or an accusation of illegal detention from members of the church at the base. Although the Sea Org members lived inside a highly secure compound in a desert hideaway, surrounded by fences and high-tech sensors, most of them weren’t really being held against their will. On the contrary, it was their will that held them. But according to Morehead, no one who escaped ever returned voluntarily.

As soon as Morehead learned that Annie had blown, his team began combing through her personal effects, calling hotels and motels in the area, and looking for clues as to where she was headed. The easiest way of doing that was to have someone pretend to be Annie and try to book a flight, then be told, for instance, “Oh, we already have you on the eleven-ten flight to Boston.” If that didn’t work, another member would call the airlines, posing as a sick relative, and demand help in finding the missing “son” or “wife” or whatever; if the airline representative refused to give out that information, the member would continue asking to speak to a higher-up, until he got the information. In one case, it was the vice president of an airline who, thinking he was responding to a family medical emergency, gave up the pertinent details. Morehead also hired former FBI or CIA agents as private investigators. As soon as an escapee made the mistake of using a credit card, the team would know almost immediately where the charge was placed. Morehead was always surprised at how easily such supposedly confidential information could be obtained. His team quickly learned that Annie was on the flight to Boston.

BY HIS ACTIONS, Miscavige showed his instinctive understanding of how to cater to the sense of entitlement that comes with great stardom. It was not just a matter of disposing of awkward personal problems, such as clinging spouses; there were also the endless demands for nourishment of an ego that is always aware of the fragility of success; the longing for privacy that is constantly at war with the demand for recognition; the need to be fortified against ordinariness and feelings of mortality; and the sense that the quality of the material world that surrounds you reflects upon your own value, and therefore everything must be made perfect. These were qualities Miscavige demanded for himself as well. He surrounded Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman with an approving and completely deferential environment, as spotless and odorless as a fairy tale. A special bungalow was prepared for their stay at Gold Base, along with a private rose garden. When the couple longed to play tennis, a court was rehabilitated, at significant expense. Miscavige heard about the couple’s fantasy of running through a field of wildflowers together, so he had Sea Org members plant a section of the desert; when that failed to meet his expectations, the meadow was plowed up and sodded with grass. Miscavige assigned them a personal chef, Sinar Parman, who had cooked for Hubbard, and had a high-end gym constructed that was mainly for the use of Cruise and himself. When a flood triggered a mudslide that despoile...

In July 1990, Cruise’s involvement with the church became public in an article in the tabloid Star. (Cruise himself didn’t admit his affiliation until two years later, in an interview with Barbara Walters.) The fact that the information was leaked, probably from a source within the church, was at once a great embarrassment for Miscavige and a relief, because Cruise’s name was now finally linked irrevocably in the public mind with Scientology. He offered an unparalleled conduit to Hollywood celebrity culture, and Miscavige went to great lengths to court him. At Thanksgiving 1990, he ordered Parman to cook dinner for Cruise’s whole family. Miscavige even arranged for Cruise to place some investments with the Feshbach brothers—Kurt, Joseph, and Matthew—three Palo Alto, California, stockbrokers. They were devoted Scientologists who had made a fortune by selling short on the stock market. According to Rathbun, when Cruise’s investments actually lost money, the Feshbachs obligingly replenished the star’s account with their personal funds.

Early on, Cruise and Miscavige shared a powerful sense of identity with each other. They were both short but powerfully built, “East Coast personalities,” as Parman diagnosed them. They shared a love of motorcycles, cars, and adventurous sports. Miscavige was bedazzled by the glamour surrounding the star, who introduced him to a social set outside of Scientology, a world Miscavige knew little about. He had spent most of his life cloistered in the Sea Org. He was thrilled when he visited Cruise on the set of Days of Thunder, and the actor took him skydiving for the first time. Cruise, for his part, fell under the spell of M...

Just before Christmas 1990, Sinar Parman was told that Tom and Nicole were going to get married, and that he and a Sea Org pastry chef, along with their wives, would be cooking for the wedding party. Parman was assured that they would get paid for their trouble; in the meantime, they should buy some civilian clothes suitable for a cold climate. Parman went shopping and put everything on his credit card, along with a Christmas present for Cruise. Then Cruise’s private jet flew them to Telluride, Colorado, where the wedding took place. They spent three days preparing meals for guests. Cruise’s auditor, Ray Mithoff, performed the ceremony, and David Miscavige served as best man. Afterward, Parman was informed that Miscavige had changed his mind about paying fo...

Paul was also scarred by the divorce—although, as would often be the case for him, he would mine the experience for his work. He created a television series, Family Law, that was based to some extent on his divorce from Diane. He always found more solace and meaning in his work than he did in his family. Each year he grew more successful, but the gap between him and his daughters grew wider. They knew him better as a writer than as a father, and they would puzzle over the fact that he was so cool to them, when his scripts were often full of emotion. Paul felt guilty about not spending time with the girls, so he would arrange to bring them to the set and assign them some small task. Alissa got to do nearly every job in the industry, from wardrobe to production assistant; she received a Directors Guild card in Canada by the time she was fifteen.

Deborah made sure Paul showed up at the annual gala and became involved in Scientology charitable organizations. Over the years, Haggis spent about $100,000 on courses and auditing and an equal amount on various Scientology initiatives. This figure doesn’t include the money that Diane gave to the church while she was married to Paul. Haggis also gave $250,000 to the International Association of Scientologists, a fund set up to protect and promote the church. Deborah spent about $150,000 on coursework of her own. Paul and Deborah held a fund-raiser in their home that raised $200,000 for a new Scientology building in Nashville, and they contributed an additional $10,000 from their own pocket. The demands for money—“regging,” it’s called in Scientology, because the calls come from the Registrar’s Office—never stopped. Paul gave them money just to keep them from calling.

Then, in May 1991, came one of the greatest public relations catastrophes in the church’s history. Time magazine published a scathing cover story titled “Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” by investigative reporter Richard Behar. The exposé revealed that just one of the religion’s many entities, the Church of Spiritual Technology, had taken in half a billion dollars in 1987 alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the parent organization were buried in secret accounts in Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and Cyprus. Many of the personalities linked with the church were savaged in the article. Hubbard himself was described as “part storyteller, part flimflam man.” The Feshbach brothers were the “terrors of the stock exchanges,” who spread false information about companies in order to drive down their valuations. Behar quoted a former church executive as saying that John Travolta stayed in the church only because he was worried that details of his sex life would be made public if he left. The article asserted that Miscavige made frequent jokes about Travolta’s “allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior.” When Behar queried Travolta’s attorney for the star’s comment, he was told that such questions were “bizarre.” “Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist,” Behar wrote.

After the Time article appeared, Miscavige was invited to appear on ABC’s Nightline, a highly prestigious news show, to defend the image of the church. He had never been interviewed in his life. He rehearsed for months, as much as four hours per day, with Rathbun and Rinder. He would prod them to ask him questions, then complain that they didn’t sound like Ted Koppel, the show’s courtly but incisive host. Miscavige would ask himself the questions in what he thought was Koppel’s voice, then respond with a hypothetical answer. He sorted through what seemed to his aides an endless number of wardrobe choices before settling on a blue suit with a purple tie and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. Finally, on Valentine’s Day 1992, he went to Washington, DC, where the show would be broadcast live.

After the show, Miscavige returned to the greenroom, where Rinder, Rathbun, and Norman Starkey, another executive, were waiting. “How’d I do?” he asked. “Gee, sir, you kicked ass,” one of the men said. “It was a home run,” Rathbun assured him. “Really?” Miscavige asked doubtfully. “Jesus Christ, I was just there and I don’t know. The guy was pissing me off so much.” Koppel won an Emmy for that show. Miscavige took credit for it, saying, “I got Ted the Emmy.” He even had a replica of an Emmy made and placed in the Officers Lounge at Gold Base. But he never went on television again.

Tom Cruise was one of the stars who appeared to be backing away from Scientology.2 He stopped moving up the Bridge. He and Nicole adopted two children, Isabella and Connor, and began spending more time in Sydney, Kidman’s hometown, where she could be close to her family. He hired a powerful publicist, Pat Kingsley, who was able to enforce rigid control over the content of the interviews the star granted. Although his affiliation with Scientology was generally known, there was no more fuel for the media mill. He seemed to be putting as much distance between himself and the church as possible.

Rathbun directed the ferocious legal assault on Time and oversaw the team of private detectives probing into Behar’s private life. The church, employing what was reported to be an annual litigation budget of $20 million and a team of more than a hundred lawyers to handle the suits already in the courts, filed a $416 million libel action against Time Warner, the parent company of the magazine, and Behar. Because the church is regarded under American law as a “public figure,” Scientology’s lawyers had to prove not only that the magazine’s allegations were wrong but also that Behar acted with “actual malice”—a legal term meaning that he knowingly published information he knew to be false, or that he recklessly disregarded the facts, because he intended to damage the church. Although there was no convincing evidence proving that the facts were wrong or that the reporter was biased, the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which sustained the district court’s initial ruling against the church. In the process, it cost Time more money in defense costs than any other case in its history. Rathbun’s strategy followed Hubbard’s dictate that the purpose of a lawsuit is “to harass and discourage rather than win.”

Overshadowing this debate was an incident that renewed the public concern about the dangerousness of totalistic movements. In February 1993, agents for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms tried to execute a search warrant on a religious commune a few miles east of Waco, Texas, that was run by a Christian apocalyptic group calling themselves the Branch Davidians. The leader, David Koresh, was stockpiling weapons, practicing polygamy, committing statutory rape, and was said to be physically abusing children, although that last charge was never proved. Following a shoot-out that caused the deaths of four government agents and six Branch Davidians, the FBI began a siege lasting nearly two months and culminating in a catastrophic blaze—broadcast all over the world—that consumed the entire compound. Seventy-five members of the sect died in the final assault, including twenty-five children. The Waco siege threatened to create a backlash against all new religious movements. On the other hand, the government’s handling of the siege, and the disastrous finale, provoked an international uproar. The hazards of unorthodox belief were clearly displayed, as were the limitations of police forces to understand and deal with fanatical movements.

No doubt the stress affected Miscavige as well. On the night of his big victory speech in the Sports Arena, Miscavige showed up for a run-through, but the stage manager, Stefan Castle, was still fiddling with the cues for a complicated laser and pyrotechnic display. According to Castle, Miscavige stormed out into the arena and began to strangle him. Miscavige let him go before any real harm was done, but it was an alarming signal. Amy Scobee, head of the Celebrity Centre at the time, also noted that Miscavige’s personality began to shift immediately after the IRS decision, becoming more aggressive and hostile. At the party at the Celebrity Centre following his speech, Miscavige rudely shoved her aside as he entered. “You just want to get rid of me,” she remembers him saying.

The St. Petersburg Times published an editorial demanding that Congress investigate the tax-exemption decision. Rathbun was sent to Florida to turn around the Times editorial board, who were not at all persuaded by his arguments. Miscavige was furious that Rathbun failed to handle the situation. One evening, Shelly Miscavige called everyone in Rathbun’s office together, and in front of his subordinates she stripped the captain’s bars off his uniform.

As a further reward, Miscavige offered Rathbun the opportunity to go to the Scientology ship, the Freewinds, and cruise the Caribbean for two years doing nothing but studying and training to be an auditor. Rathbun could finally obtain OT III. It was an offer he couldn’t resist. That was a rewarding time for Rathbun. But as soon as he got off the ship after his time away, Miscavige called him into his office and said, “I finally know who my SP is. The two years you were gone was the only unenturbulated time in my life.” He ordered him to Clearwater, his rank broken, as a trainee. That didn’t last, either. A number of tabloid sensations arose surrounding Scientology celebrities—Lisa Marie Presley was divorcing Michael Jackson, Kirstie Alley was divorcing actor Parker Stevenson—and Miscavige again turned to Rathbun to cool the press down.

When McPherson entered room 174, she was a lovely, shapely young woman. She underwent an Introspection Rundown, the same procedure that Hubbard had developed on the Apollo two decades earlier to treat psychotic behavior. It involved placing McPherson in solitary confinement and providing her with water, food, and vitamin supplements. All communication had to be in writing. Instead of calming down, McPherson stopped eating. She screamed, she clawed her attendants, she spoke in gibberish, she fouled herself, she banged her head against the wall. Staff members strapped her down and tried to feed her with a turkey baster. On December 5, McPherson slipped into a coma. When church members decided to take her to the hospital that night, they bypassed the Morton Plant Hospital, just down the street, where McPherson had originally been seen, and drove her forty-five minutes away, passing four other hospitals, to the Columbia New Port Richey Hospital, where there was a doctor affiliated with the church. The woman they finally wheeled into the emergency room was skeletally thin and covered with scratches, bruises, and dark brown lesions. She was also dead. She had suffered a pulmonary embolism on the way to the hospital. In the eyes of the world press, Scientology had murdered Lisa McPherson. She was one of nine Scientologists who had died under mysterious circumstances at the Clearwater facility.

The McPherson case loomed over the church for five years, with an ongoing police investigation, protests in front of Scientology facilities, lawsuits on the part of the family, and endless unwanted press. Embarrassing details emerged, including the fact that McPherson had spent $176,700 on Scientology services in her last five years, but she had died with only $11 in her savings account. Rathbun and Mike Rinder, the church’s spokesman, were responsible for managing the situation, but Miscavige supervised every detail. The level of tension was nearly unbearable.

Perhaps because of Rinder’s lifelong service to the church, Miscavige saw him as a rival; or perhaps the leader’s frustration with the continual bad press made his spokesperson a particular object of his wrath. At any rate, Marty Rathbun got a call from Shelly Miscavige around Christmas in 1997, the first year of the protests over Lisa McPherson’s death. Rathbun was back at Gold Base. Shelly said that Dave wanted him to report to his quarters right away. Rathbun rushed down the hill to Miscavige’s bungalow, where Shelly was waiting just outside the screen door. A moment later, Mike Rinder, who had also been summoned, came racing around the corner of the house. According to both men, the screen door suddenly flew open and Miscavige came out, wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe. According to Rathbun and Rinder, Miscavige hit Rinder in the face and stomach, then grabbed him around the neck and slammed him into a tree. Rinder fell into the ivy, where Miscavige continued kicking him several times.5 Rathbun just stood there, stunned and puzzled about why he had been ordered to watch this display. Afterward, he decided that he was there to back up Miscavige in case Rinder had the nerve to resist. He was the “silent enforcer.”

Just as the debate in Germany was coming to a climax, in March 1997, thirty-nine members of a group calling itself Heaven’s Gate committed suicide in a San Diego mansion. They apparently had hoped to time their deaths in order to ascend to a spacecraft that they believed was following Comet Hale-Bopp. Marshall Applewhite, their leader, a former choirmaster, represented himself as a reincarnated Jesus who was receiving guidance from the television show Star Trek.

Paul put the girls in a private school, but that lasted only six months. They weren’t entirely comfortable talking to people who weren’t Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. They demanded to be sent to a boarding institution on an isolated hilltop near Sheridan, Oregon, called the Delphian School—or the “mother school,” as it was known to Scientologists.

EVER SINCE the Time exposé, the church had been frantically trying to recover Tom Cruise. Both Cruise and Nicole Kidman were attaining ever greater success; Cruise became the first actor to star in five consecutive films to gross more than $100 million in the United States, including Jerry Maguire and the first Mission: Impossible; Kidman was also gaining international renown with her roles in Batman Forever and To Die For. They gave the impression that they were putting Scientology behind them. In 1996, Marty Rathbun had gone to Los Angeles to audit Cruise, but that one session went nowhere. According to Rathbun, Miscavige blamed Nicole Kidman and viewed her as a gold digger who was faking Scientology. He says that Miscavige was hopeful that if they portrayed Nicole Kidman as a Suppressive Person, Cruise could be peeled away from her.

Cruise had begun dating the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, and in the fall of 2001 Rathbun began auditing her as well. At the same time, he was still acting as Nicole Kidman’s Ethics Officer in the church, even though she and Cruise were engaged in a bitter divorce proceeding. One of the issues was whether the children would be educated in schools using the Hubbard method, which Kidman opposed. That was another battle she lost. Although Tom and Nicole split custody of their children, both Isabella and Connor soon chose to live exclusively with their father. Rathbun says this was because the Scientology staff, especially Tommy Davis, quietly worked to turn the children against Kidman. “Tommy told them over and over again their mother was a sociopath and after a while they believed him,” he recalled. “They had daily sessions with Tommy. I was there. I saw it.”

According to several former Sea Org members, Rathbun’s auditing sessions with Cruise were videotaped. Tom De Vocht, a former church official, said Miscavige would watch them and then regale his inner circle, over his nightly whiskey, with stories of Cruise’s confessions, dwelling especially on his sex life.

Whatever restraint Cruise felt about Miscavige eventually fell away, however, and Miscavige was once again folded into the star’s inner circle. There were movie nights in Cruise’s mansion. Miscavige flew with Cruise in the Warner Bros. jet to a test screening of The Last Samurai in Arizona. The two men became closer than ever. Cruise later said of Miscavige, “I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from LRH. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders. I’ve met them all.”

IN 2001, Haggis was fired from Family Law, the show he had created. His career, which for so long seemed to be a limitless staircase toward fame and fortune, now took a plunge. He began working at home. Within a week, he started writing a movie script called Million Dollar Baby, based on a series of short stories by F. X. Toole. He spent a year working on it, drawing upon some of his own painful memories. He identified with the character of a sour old boxing coach, Frankie Dunn. Like Haggis, Frankie is estranged from his daughter. His letters to her are returned. He turns to religion, going to Mass every day and seeking a forgiveness that he doesn’t really believe in. Into the coach’s dismal life comes another young woman, Maggie Fitzgerald, an aspiring boxer from a white trash background. All of the loss and longing he feels for his daughter is apparent in his mentoring of this gritty young fighter, who has more faith in him than he has in himself. But Maggie is paralyzed when her neck is broken in a fight. In a climactic moment, she begs Frankie to pull the plug and let her die. Haggis faced a similar choice in real life with his best friend, who was brain-dead from a staph infection. “They don’t die easily,” he recalled. “Even in a coma, he kicked and moaned for twelve hours.”

Production was shut down for a week and a half until Haggis returned, with a nurse at his side who checked his vital signs every quarter hour. Sandra Bullock brought him green tea and refused to let him drink coffee. Every time Haggis tried to stand up, she told him to sit down. She had a kind of implacable maternal authority. He finished the film in his chair with a cup of tea in his hands.

Tom Cruise was now considered the unofficial Ethics Officer of Hollywood. He was the embodiment of Hubbard’s vision of a church with temples dedicated to celebrity rather than God. Cruise’s intensity and commitment, along with his spectacular ambition, matched Miscavige’s own. It was as if Miscavige had rubbed a magic lantern and Cruise had appeared, a genie who could open any door. He was one of the few people that Miscavige saw as a peer. Miscavige even wondered if there was some way to appoint Cruise the church’s Inspector General for Ethics—Rathbun’s job. “He’d say that Tom Cruise was the only person in Scientology, other than himself, that he would trust to run the church,” one former Sea Org member recalled. Rathbun observed: “Miscavige convinced Cruise that he and Tom were two of only a handful of truly ‘big beings’ on the planet. He instructed Cruise that LRH was relying upon them to unite with the few others of their ilk on earth to make it onto ‘Target Two’—some unspecified galactic locale where they would meet up with Hubbard in the afterlife.”

For years, Herskovitz and several of Haggis’s closest non-Scientology friends participated in an irregular Friday get-together called Boys’ Night. They met at an Italian restaurant on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. The actor Josh Brolin usually attended, along with director Oliver Stone, producer Stephen Nathan, and a peace activist and former priest named Blase Bonpane, among others. One night an attractive New York Times reporter came to write about the event, and the men decided that she made them all a lot more appealing than they were on other occasions. After that, they voted to invite one woman to join them whenever they met. Usually, it’s a beautiful actress. Julie Delpy and Charlize Theron have both been accorded this honor. Madeleine Stowe recalled it as the funniest evening she had ever had, although she had the sense to bring her husband along. She remembered Haggis sitting back, wisecracking, smoking a cigarette, watching it all happen.

Mike Rinder was in the Hole for two years, even though he continued to be the church’s chief spokesperson. Bizarrely, he would sometimes be pulled out and ordered to conduct a press conference, or to put on a tuxedo and jet off to a Scientology gala; then he would be returned to confinement. He and other executives were made to race around the room on their hands and bare knees, day after day, tearing open scabs on their knees and leaving permanent scars. Miscavige once directed De Vocht to rough up Rinder, because “he’s just an SP.” De Vocht took Rinder outside and gave him a going-over. But De Vocht was also frightened of Miscavige. He took to sleeping with a broken broom handle. When another executive spoke up about the violence, he was beaten by two of Miscavige’s assistants and made to mop the bathroom floor with his tongue.

Scientologists are trained to believe that whatever happens to them is somehow their fault, so much of the discussion in the Hole centered on what they had done to deserve this fate. The possibility that the leader of the church might be irrational or even insane was so taboo that no one could even think it, much less voice it aloud.