The man in the dark suit walks into the centre of the screen and welcomes you to the Church of Scientology. His presence is Magus-like, just this side of sinister, hinting at knowledge of dark matters, beyond ordinary human ken, the voice urgent, probing, concerned, the hair – and everybody’s hair was like this in the eighties – absurd: ‘Right this instant you are on the threshold of the next trillion years.’ Behind him, a steady stream of young, attractive people walk through two large doors, into some place the camera cannot go. ‘You will live it in shivering, agonized darkness. Or you will live it triumphantly in the light. The choice is yours, not ours.’
If you are a committed Trekkie you might recognise the actor from the movie Star Trek: Insurrection in which he plays a Tarlac officer – that’s a space alien with an enormous head with reptilian ridges to go – proclaiming: ‘Activating injector assembly… Injector assembly has separated.’
Larry Anderson, the man on the screen, is now out. He’s left after 33 years inside the Church. He’s an Out-Out, no longer a member of the Church or a Scientologist.
We met in Hollywood, probably the most over-rated place in the world, a fantasy factory parked in a smog-rich, overly-expensive industrial estate of dreams gone rancid. Not too far away on the street where the stars have their names in cement sad wannabes dress up as Batman and Robin, Cat-Woman, Spiderman and Freddie from the horror movie. They strut to and fro, barking at tourists who take their picture but don’t hand over five dollars. Behold our cheap celluloid gods… five bucks, please.
There was a time when the Church of the Stars love-bombed Hollywood, and Hollywood returned that affection. But the times, they are a-changing.
Larry has become an avenging angel, turning his voice against the Church. Back in 2007 he started to question the faith he once promoted: ‘I began to speculate that those early gains and wins as they say in Scientology were, in fact, the bait, the hook to bring you in. As a Scientologist you’re not only encouraged – you really had your arms twisted never to look at media. If you see a story on the Church, turn it off because it will only destroy the gains you’ve achieved up to now. Well, I said, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m going on-line.’ He trumpeted the word ‘on-line’ as if it was a statement of personal freedom, a super-hero breaking his chains, not an ordinary thing to do in the twenty-first century.
As a ‘public’ Scientologist, Larry did not get much of an insight into the innards of the Church. But when he became a presenter, advertising Scientology, he went to Gold in the desert to work on films to promote the Church. There, he saw things ordinary Scientologists never got to see: ‘The edict came down this film needs to be done tonight, it’s got to be done, so we were working through the night, one, three, five in the morning, and of course I might have gotten a very nice night’s sleep the night before and just had to work a long shift to get the film done but the Sea Org members who were the crew didn’t get a good night’s sleep the night before. They’re working seven days a week, often times 20 hours a day getting literally three, four hours of sleep. Here and there falling asleep like I saw on the set and then of course they’d get punished for that.’
Once, at Clearwater, at Christmas, Larry saw Sea Org members on the RPF, dressed in black, not talking to anyone, moving ‘like robots’: ‘They were scrubbing the stage floor with toothbrushes.’
As well as the treatment of the Sea Org members, Larry came to resent the constant high-pressure salesmanship: ‘Back in summer 2008 they released the basic Hubbard books again. Over the course of the 33 years I bought those books, I think, on four different occasions. Each new release we were given the story that they had now found corrections that weren’t integrated into the previous release and a chapter wasn’t there or some story about how we would now be getting fully official fully documented L Ron Hubbard basic books, the definitive works are now here.’
On inspection, the books turned out to be essentially the same: ‘It’s just another slick packaging thing and what drove me nuts was that the primary reason they were being re-released – and I was expecting some really clever story that they were now on their fourth release, you know, boy, they’d better come up with a great story – was that they discovered that the people who transcribed L Ron Hubbard’s audio tapes goofed. It was the most ludicrous explanation and yet everyone was standing up and doing standing ovations, “I can’t wait to shell out another 3000 dollars on my basic books again.”’ David Miscavige was doing the pitch.
After filming we went to a café to take a bite to eat with Larry. As we were relaxing, we noticed someone filming us: the usual.
A few miles up the coast lives Jason Beghe, star of GI Jane and a good number of American TV shows. I thought we were being tailed by a white Audi, but whoever was behind the wheel drove too fast. Beghe’s house has a fantastic view of the Pacific. I found myself spouting Keats, never a good sign: when stout Cortez, tumpety-tum, stood silent upon a peak in Darien…
‘Oh, Truth is beauty, beauty truth, and all of that nonsense,’ deflected Jason, nicely. He spent 13 years inside and around a million dollars. Now Jason thinks he was in a cult. He said it was hard to describe why he spent so long inside because ‘you lose your own ability to make a rational decision’. The starkest evidence of it being a cult was disconnection: ‘I can’t think of many religions where such a large percentage of people are willing to dump their own son, daughter, best friend, wife, husband because they won’t have Scientology anymore. That’s going too far. It’s insanity to me.’
I told him that Tommy Davis said that disconnection is a lie.
Jason talked about the day when he finally left, the cut-off was sheer: ‘Nobody ever talked to me again. All my old friends were gone. My son, Bix, four years old in a Scientology pre-school, kicked out, no friends, boom!, cause he was connected to me. It was like boom! I went to call some people and say, “Hey,” and they wouldn’t take my call. And if I left a message, never returned, and these are people that would come to me, hug me, kiss me and tell me how much they love me and blah blah blah. So that’s disconnection. My wife was made to disconnect from her mother. That’s my personal experience. I know many, many, many, many people that were forced to disconnect.’
What Tommy was saying about disconnection not happening was ‘just a lie.’
The mind-holes inside the Church went deep: ‘We’re these wonderful, powerful, superhuman OTs [Operating Thetans] and Clears and we’re well beyond anyone else. Then why is it that you can’t even see a differing opinion on the internet? That to me is a show of just incredible weakness. These people are not stupid but they go well, OK, and then not read the newspapers. If you can’t handle a newspaper, how OT are you?’
Jason, who plays a psychiatrist on the television but freely admits he’s no expert, said: ‘Even the most degraded criminal will protect his mother. These people drop mothers like a hot potato because they have decided that this philosophy or the superstructure of the Church itself is more important. So they say: “Well, you’re dead to me.” How do you make that leap? It’s something like mind control. It’s totally unnatural, it’s hypnotism, I don’t know what the hell it is but it’s something. The bottom line is handle or disconnect. In other words get them to behave in a way that they’re not a danger to me or the group or else dump them.’
Our mutual acquaintance cropped up: ‘Tommy was one of the most beautiful, sweet and enthusiastic guys. He liked to have fun, and was I think a person worthy of admiration. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he could have been out partying with Paris Hilton and he decided he was going to dedicate his life to helping others for no money. That’s a personality trait that’s rare. So his intention is spectacular, very admirable person.’
Tommy was weird with me, I said, off camera, very nice, cameras around, aggressive.
‘I’ve done a lot of acting scenes with people and you get to know when someone’s really there and when they’re acting. He’s not good at doing that. I don’t buy it. Looks manufactured to me. It smacks of “methinks he doth protest too much”. It looks like an admission of guilt to me.’
He was faking it?
‘It’s much worse. For Tommy’s sake I wish he knew he was lying but he’s convinced “I’m telling the truth” which is further along the line of brainwashing. Instead of having a tool to use, you are used by the tool.’
Jason explained that in 1999 he had a terrible car accident, broke bones, broke his neck and fell into a coma for three and a half weeks. Tommy Davis and another Scientologist from the Celebrity Centre came to the hospital: ‘24 hours one of them was always by my bedside’.
Later, Jason discovered that Tommy was encouraging his family and doctors not to use ‘certain drugs – Psyche drugs – that may disqualify me from being eligible to continue in Scientology. Don’t construe that as evil. Construe that as love: Jason needs Scientology.’
There is compelling evidence that L Ron Hubbard when he died was full of psychiatric drugs, I said. Why on earth should the Church continue to challenge the use of psychiatric drugs in the way that they do?
‘If you’re looking for logic you came to the wrong place,’ said Jason. ‘This is not logic.’
When Jason tried to leave, they made it difficult for him to do so amicably. Frustrated by the delay, he took a step from which there was no return. Following ‘months and months and months of this I finally knew the deal breaker. I just said, that’s it, give me my money back and then the fucking guillotine went down and the party was over.’
I brought up the space alien Satan.
‘If you want to believe in Xenu and this whole routine, that’s fine. The justification for keeping it secret is that this is such powerful information that somebody who hasn’t done the previous steps would go into something called Freewheeling, they wouldn’t be able to sleep, they would go insane and they would die.’
That’s the official reason. But Jason suspects the real reason is different: ‘Keeping something rare keeps it more valuable and it’s a way to keep people interested and to pay a premium to gain the information.’
In that sense, question: is it a religion or is it a racket?
‘They are not necessarily mutually exclusive, are they?’
The Church of Scientology says of Jason that he is an ‘apostate poster boy’, ‘a D-list actor’ and ‘Hollywood Psycho’. He seemed like a good bloke to me.
Private investigators tracked us around California: the usual, from LA to Gold base, which we visited with Marty and Amy Scobee, pointing out The Hole from the safety of the public road. Marty and Amy told me about what they saw as the madness at the heart of Scientology under the rule of David Miscavige, telling me the stories I’ve set out in Chapter Five. The private eyes in 2010 were robots. They said very little. Two stood out: a thin one and a fat one. The difference between 2007 and 2010 for us was no Tommy popping up here and there like a jack-in-the-box. Hiring private investigators to follow us around must have cost the Church thousands of dollars – and provides a simple definition for a religion: a belief system, open and honest about itself, which enjoys the respect of society and does not employ private investigators.
The Hollywood stars who have now got out lost money and peace-of-mind. But members of the Sea Org? They lost years of their lives. Ask an ex-follower of the Church of Scientology how do they get along with their family members still inside and the answer seems to be universally depressing.
Claire and Marc Headley were practically born into the Church. Earlier, we’ve heard how Claire said she had to relay obscene messages for the Leader and how Marc said he was once beaten up by him – claims the Church and Miscavige deny. They both signed the billion-year contract of loyalty to the Sea Org, becoming adepts when they were both just 16. Claire said: ‘My mother joined the Sea Org when I was four years old.’ Claire had no choice. The hardest thing for Claire was that she had no knowledge whatsoever of the outside world, and feared it, us, out of total ignorance.
Trapped inside the Sea Org, Claire knew something was wrong: ‘There was 24/ 7 security cameras, people everywhere, it was definitely a very strict operating environment. Fear and intimidation was the dominant controlling emotions of my life for 20 years.’ As a woman in the Church, Claire had to put up with a lot.
The most bizarre behaviour, she said, came from the Leader. Once, he told Claire, she said: ‘I was “a f***ing c**t” because I greeted one of his staff members in an enthusiastic manner.’
Marc chipped in: ‘One time when we were in a meeting with David Miscavige. He said that the only expansion that two senior executives in Scientology had ever caused was by sticking their cocks in each other’s assholes. That’s David Miscavige in a nutshell.’
Now they are both out. In the Sea Org, there is no sex before marriage. When Claire, just 19, and married to Marc, realised that she was pregnant, she had a horrible decision to make. You can’t have a child and stay in the Sea Org.
Marc explained: ‘The Sea Organisation is not in the business of raising children or raising babies. It’s not in their business model.’
For Claire to have her baby she would have to leave the Sea Org. Fearing it meant leaving her only home and breaking from her family she felt an abortion was her only option. Two years later, the couple were posted 2,000 miles apart.
‘I was in Clearwater, Florida,’ Claire told me, ‘when I found out I was pregnant again. I requested authorisation to be able to call Marc. That was disapproved, not allowed. So I literally could not even tell him about it until eight months after the fact when I next saw him in person.’
If she chose to have the baby, she faced never seeing him again. Unable to talk things through with her husband, she had another abortion: ‘It was absolutely the most horrifying, upsetting, deeply disturbing situation I’ve ever been in.’
For its part, the Church said Claire made a statement at the time that she did not want the child and never wanted children. It confirmed pregnant women cannot remain in the Sea Org but they are free to leave with their husbands.
Marc left the Church on his motorbike on a rainy day. Chased off the road by Church security, he said, he crashed, picked himself off the floor and was rescued by a cop. He got back on the damaged bike and drove into the town of Hemet at its new maximum speed: five mph. Claire got out a short while afterwards. But since that say, both sets of parents, still in the Church, have shunned them. The couple have two sons, both seriously into Thomas The Tank Engine. The little boys have never seen their grandmothers.
‘My mother,’ said Marc, ‘has never met her only grandchildren and Claire’s parents have never met their only grandchildren.’
The day after Claire fled, she said, ‘my mother, my stepfather, my half-brother, my two half sisters were all pulled into Scientology and told I was a Suppressive Person. They could have no further contact with me.’
The Church said it is a fundamental human right to cease communication with someone. It added disconnection is used against expelled members and those who attack the Church. It said Marc and Claire Headley were declared suppressive persons and expelled. The family’s decision not to have contact was theirs alone.
‘Speaking to me,’ said Marc ‘would risk their and all of mankind’s future eternity.’
Claire said: ‘The last phone call I had with my sister was her bawling her eyes out, telling me that she could never talk to me again and she could not talk she had to hang up. That was the last conversation I had with my sister in Jan 2005 – I haven’t talked to her since.’
The couple tried to sue the Church, saying they had been abused at work, used as slaves, working illegal hours and paid a pittance. Because the Church is classed as a religion in the United States, they lost the case. Members of the Sea Org – in America, a religious body – are legally exempt from labour law. As a result, they ended up owing the multi-billion dollar Church $40,000 – and had to hand over their savings, sell many of their possessions, including their children’s swing, to try and make up the money. Word got around the ex-Church community – both ex-Scientologists, Out-Outs, and people who have left the Church but still believe in L Ron, Outs, – and tens of thousands of dollars was donated to the Headleys. In Britain, where the Church is not officially recognised as a religion for the purposes of English charity law, they might have stood a chance. So the difference between religious recognition and non-recognition is not academic. For the Headleys, it almost drove them bankrupt. It did cost them their boys’ swing.
Like the Headleys, Tommy Davis was practically born into the Church. He was three years old when his mother, Anne Archer, became a Scientologist. There you are: sympathy for the devil. Thing is: he’s not a devil.
We flew to Florida, to catch up with Mike Rinder. I interviewed Mike on top of the car park in downtown Clearwater, just as I had Shawn Lonsdale three years before. Not long into the interview an enormous black SUV approached. It boasted a squaloid radiator grille and tinted windows, making it look the most passive-aggressive motor vehicle I have ever seen. I walked towards the SUV, my hand upraised. Coincidentally, I am sure, the driver elected to park somewhere further back and he started to reverse slowly. From the perspective of Bill’s camera, it looked as though I was forcing the SUV backwards by the telekinetic power of my hand, like Magneto in the film X-Men. This image of my superhuman powers was so disturbing, so challenging to the rational mind, that the BBC elected not to broadcast it. Shame.
When it finally stopped the SUV disgorged two men. One of them was the fat robot who had filmed us at Gold, two thousand miles away and less than 24 hours before. They were silent. The cameraman was working but the other man was not. I offered him my hand. He refused it.
‘Have you been told by the Church not to talk to us?’
Silence. Good answer.
We got back into Mike’s car and drove down the multiple tiers of the car park to the ground level. In the side mirror the black SUV loomed monstrously large, as if we were living inside a Hollywood thriller. Immediately outside the car park was a disused drive-in bank, essentially lots of car lanes, open and empty. Mike drove down one lane; the SUV followed. Mike reached the end of the lane and turned hard around and drove back along one of the lanes; the SUV followed. It was a stately gavotte in metal, chrome and rubber. Following them, following us, was the BBC back-up car driven by assistant producer Jon Coffey with producer Kate Stead riding shotgun. Mole was lurking in Essex, having a baby. After a prolonged to-and-fro-ing inside the empty drive-in bank facility, all of us in the car were in danger of being car sick. Mike headed home. The black SUV followed. Jon and Katy followed them, until a car containing two chaps in white-ish uniforms stopped them. Jon wound down his window, assumed that they were Scientology security, patronised them and drove off. Too late, it dawned on Jon that they were, in fact, officers from the Clearwater Police Department.
The black SUV followed us all the way back to Mike’s home, where it parked outside. I rapped on the window, and accused the private investigators of harassing Mike in the name of religion. No reply.
The level of harassment was extraordinary and unbecoming.
Mike’s mum and dad joined the Church when he was six years old. He has known nothing else since primary school. He married and became a father to son Ben and daughter Taryn while inside. After he got out, Mike’s family became part of the battleground. Mike has tried to see his son, Ben, who is still in the Church and has disconnected from Mike. Like the rest of Mike’s family, Ben has refused to have anything to do with him.
In late April 2010 Mike drove his girlfriend Christie to a medical appointment. He sat in the car, while Christie was in the clinic. Seven people started walking towards him, including Cathy Rinder, his ex-wife, Taryn, his daughter, Andrew, his brother and four other Scientologists, one of whom is a massive chap. It was seven members of the Church against one ex-member. Mike had not seen his ex-wife and daughter for three years.
What happened next is disputed. But Mike was on the phone to a reporter who was taping the call – and that reporter was me.
First, you can hear several people screaming at the same time: ‘Fuck you, Mike, Fuck you.’
Jenny Linson, the ex-wife of Tom DeVocht screeches: ‘You look at your daughter. You piece of shit.’
Mike: ‘Oh, Fuck off Jenny.’
Jenny: ‘Fuck you. You deserted your family, you piece of shit!’
Cathy Rinder: ‘You walked out on me, you fucker.’
Taryn Rinder: ‘And you tried to fuck with Benjamin, you tried to fuck with Benjamin.’
Mike: ‘Taryn…’
Taryn: ‘You’re trying to fuck with me. You’re trying to fuck with my home.’
Mike: ‘Taryn…’
Taryn: ‘Your church, and my church, you’re fucking with everything I believe in.’
Cathy: ‘You leave Benjamin alone, you knock it off.’
Mike: ‘That’s fine, Cathy.’
Cathy: ‘No, it’s not fine, you fuck off, you fucking stop.’
Jenny: (nonsensically) ‘Your family came here to talk to you, and you refuse to talk to your family.’
Andrew Rinder: ‘Talk to me Michael, talk to me.’
Sweeney (from London, down the phone to Mike): ‘Mike, are you OK?’
Andrew: ‘Don’t be a dick, don’t be a fucking dick.’
Cathy: ‘I’m telling you, you better stop, you better stop… You have no fucking idea, Ok. I don’t give a fuck. All I know, is that what you’ve been doing and what you’re doing now is committing SP acts every minute, of every fucking day…’
At one point Mike says his brother and ex-wife tried to take the car keys off him. In the scuffle Cathy’s arm got grazed. The police arrived. The police report stated the injury was incidental contact – not intentional assault. No charges were filed.
Mike was stoical when he reflected on it: ‘The intention was intimidation. It was to make me worried. It was very unpleasant.’
The evidence from the audio is clear: seven members of the Church approached Mike and began screaming at him. The effect on him of seeing his ex-wife, daughter and brother after three years of no contact must have been extraordinarily painful.