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January 21 - February 13, 2021
Project Hunter was the United States, where Scientologists penetrated the IRS, the Justice, Treasury, and Labor Departments, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as foreign embassies and consulates; private companies and organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Better Business Bureau; and newspapers—including the St. Petersburg Times,8 the Clearwater Sun, and the Washington Post—that were critical of the religion. In an evident attempt at blackmail, they stole the Los Angeles IRS
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The trip to New York took three days, with Hubbard smoking continuously in the backseat and crying, “There they are! They’re after us!” every time he saw a police car.
“Quentin, or ‘Q’ as his friends called him, was 22 at the time,” Erlich later wrote. “He looked 15 and acted 5.”
Despite its reputation for carnality and narcissism, Los Angeles has always been a spawning ground for new religions.
A constant stream of aspiring young actors, writers, and directors came to Hollywood with common dreams, trying to leverage whatever ability or looks they might have in a market already overwhelmed by beautiful and talented and chronically unemployed young people.
“The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed,” he writes. “These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”
Have you ever stolen anything? Have you ever blackmailed anybody? Have you ever been involved in an abortion? There are further questions asking if the respondent has ever sold drugs, committed adultery, practiced homosexuality, had sex with a family member or a person of another race.
impressed by the extent to which minds could be altered and “truth blurred to the point of near extinction.”
In 1955, he distributed a pamphlet, which he probably wrote,
Just then, a school bus pulled up, full of kids from a religion class at the Pacific Palisades high school. Taylor recalled with alarm that they were coming to take a tour that she had previously arranged. The wide-eyed teens watched as Taylor explained to the teacher that this wasn’t the best time for the tour. (They never rescheduled.)
the Child Care Org, the Scientology nursery. There were thirty infants crammed into a small apartment with wall-to-wall cribs, with one nanny for every twelve children. It was dark and dank and the children were rarely, if ever, taken outside.
Since she had joined Scientology at the age of fourteen, she had never read a book that hadn’t been written by L. Ron Hubbard.
“There are two sides to the story, but I don’t know both sides,” Travolta blithely said when he was asked about Operation Snow White. “I’m not involved with that.”
Hubbard’s location was a deep secret. Scientologists who asked were told he was “over the rainbow.”
HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING his thousand-page opus, Battlefield Earth, in 1980. (Mitt Romney would name it as his favorite novel.)
Irwin says that Miscavige used a tire iron to pummel the pay phone, without much effect. Finally he was able to yank the receiver off the cable.
David Mayo was sent to the RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert heat for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out.
Privately, she called him “Little Napoleon.”
a studiously neutral tone,
more than two thousand Scientologists gathered in the Hollywood Palladium for a special announcement.
in Mark’s opinion, his brother was just being warehoused, held in a chemical straitjacket.
Because of this incident, Rathbun was singled out for his fearlessness, or what Scientology terms his “high level of confront.”
looking like a nerdy Hollywood executive with a lot of money to spend on clothes.
A year after 9/11, Tom Cruise set up a program for more than a thousand rescue workers in New York to go through a similar procedure, which was paid for in part by using city money. Many participants reported positive results, saying that they had sweated a kind of black paste through their pores while in the sauna. The Borough of Manhattan gratefully declared March 13 (Hubbard’s birthday), 2004, as “Hubbard Detoxification Day.”
Logan was served with a “non-enturbulation order,” which meant that he should stop stirring things up.
Each year, a minimum of a hundred people attempted to escape from Gold, but few got away cleanly.
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.
Barbra Streisand introduced herself to the Dalai Lama, and he asked what she did. “A little singing, a little dancing,” she told him.
Gray had also worked closely with the Reagan campaign. He regaled the Scientologists with his ability to take a “mindless actor” and turn him into the “Teflon President.”
video news releases made to look like actual reports rather than advertisements.
Rathbun’s strategy followed Hubbard’s dictate that the purpose of a lawsuit is “to harass and discourage rather than win.”
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.
For months, Cruise kept in contact with Paige’s office, urging that Scientology techniques be folded into the president’s No Child Left Behind program.
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.
They had already surrendered the possibility of ordinary family life. Sex outside of marriage was taboo, so many members married in their teens; but since 1986, children have been forbidden to Sea Org members. Former church executives say that abortions were common and forcefully encouraged.
The contrast with the other Sea Org members is stark. They eat in a mess hall, which features a meat-and-potatoes diet and a salad bar, except for occasional extended periods of rice and beans for those who are being punished. The average cost per meal as of 2005 (according to Marc Headley, who participated in the financial planning each week) was about seventy-five cents a head—significantly less than what is spent per inmate in the California prison system.
Cultural touchstones common to most Americans are often lost on Sea Org members at Gold Base. They may not know the name of the president of the United States or be able to tell the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. It’s not as if there is no access to outside information; there is a big-screen television in the dining hall, and people can listen to the radio or subscribe to newspapers and magazines; however, news from the outside world begins to lose its relevance when people are outside of the wider society for extended periods of time. Many Sea Org members have not
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Miscavige keeps a number of dogs, including five beagles.
His parents joined the Sea Org when he was five, and the very next year he signed his own billion-year contract.
Scientology counseling, a heretical practice known in Scientology as squirreling.
Polls showed that Cruise was still ranked as the most powerful actor in Hollywood, and even the most powerful celebrity in the world, but he was also ranked number one as the celebrity that people would least like to have as their best friend.
it is also common to assume that homosexuality is handled at the OT III level, where the body thetans that cause such problems can be audited away.
if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil rights violations.”
Isham did consider Haggis’s plea to look at the websites or the articles in the St. Petersburg Times, but he decided “it was like reading Mein Kampf if you wanted to know something about the Jewish religion.”
Davis went through a period of doubt and actually considered dropping out of the Sea Org, according to Scobee, but then he recommitted and became so enthusiastic that he had the Sea Org logo—a laurel wreath with twenty-six leaves representing the stars in the Galactic Confederacy—tattooed on his arm. When Miscavige found out, he berated Davis, saying that he had violated the church’s copyright.
“Getting arrested for being drunk on the intersection of Bourbon and Toulouse?” Davis cracked. “That’s like getting arrested for being a leper in a leper colony.”
There is no point in questioning Scientology’s standing as a religion; in the United States, the only opinion that really counts is that of the IRS;
