Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (41 page)

In March 1995, adherents of a Japanese movement called
Aum Shinrikyo
(“Supreme Truth”) attacked five subway trains in Tokyo with
sarin gas. Twelve commuters died; thousands more might have if the gas had been more highly refined. It was later discovered that this was just one of at least fourteen attacks the group staged in order to set off a chain of events intended to result in an apocalyptic world war. The leader of the group,
Shoko Asahara, a blind yoga instructor, combined
the tenets of
Buddhism with notions drawn from
Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation Trilogy
, which depicts a secretive group of scientists who are preparing to take over the world. Many of Asahara’s followers were indeed scientists and engineers from top Japanese universities who were enchanted by this scheme. They purchased military hardware in the former Soviet Union and sought to acquire nuclear warheads. When that failed, they bought a sheep farm in Western Australia that happened to be atop a rich vein of uranium. They cultivated chemical and biological weapons, such as anthrax, Ebola virus, cyanide, and VX gas. They had used such agents in previous attacks, but failed to create the kind of mass slaughter they hoped would bring on civil war and nuclear Armageddon. Still, Aum exposed the narrow boundary between religious cultism and terror, which would soon become more obvious with the rise of
al-Qaeda. A spokesperson for the Church of Scientology in New Zealand explained that the source of Aum Shinrikyo’s crimes
was the practice of psychiatry in Japan.

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
.

Although Scientology has persecuted its critics and defectors, it has never engaged in mass murder or suicides; however, the public anxiety surrounding these sensational events added to the rancor and fear that welled up in Germany. Could Scientology also turn violent? There were elements mixed into these various groups that resembled some features of Scientology—magical beliefs and science fiction being the most obvious. Past lives were a common theme. Like Aum Shinrikyo, Scientology has ties to Buddhist notions of enlightenment and Hindu beliefs in karma and reincarnation. Structurally, Aum Shinrikyo was the most similar to Scientology, having both a public membership and a cloistered clergy, like the Sea Org, called renunciates, who carried out directives that the larger organization knew little or nothing about. When the attacks on the subway took place, Aum’s membership
in Japan was estimated to be about 10,000, with an additional 30,000 in Russia, and some scattered pockets worldwide, with resources close to $1 billion
—figures that compare with some estimates of Scientology
today. What separated these groups from Scientology was their orientation toward apocalypse and their yearning for the end-time. That has never been a feature of Scientology. Clearly, however, the lure of totalistic religious movements defies easy categorization. Such groups can arise anywhere and spread like viruses, and it is impossible to know which ones will turn lethal, or why.

Both the German government and the Scientologists viewed their struggle through the prism of Germany’s
Nazi past.
Ursula Caberta, the head of the
Hamburg anti-Scientology task force, compared
Hubbard’s
Introduction to Scientology Ethics
to Adolf Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
: “Hitler was thinking
that the Aryans were going to rule the world, the
untermenschen
. The philosophy of L. Ron Hubbard is the same.” In response to such statements, in January 1997 a group of Hollywood celebrities, agents, lawyers, and movie executives published a full-page open letter to Chancellor
Helmut Kohl in the
International Herald Tribune
. “Hitler made religious intolerance official government policy,” the letter stated. “In the 1930s it was the Jews. Today it is the Scientologists.” The letter compared the boycotts of
Cruise, Travolta, and
Corea to Nazi book-burnings. The letter was written and paid for by
Bertram Fields, then the most powerful lawyer in Hollywood, whose clients included Travolta and Cruise. None of the thirty-four signatories of the document were Scientologists, but many were Jews. Most of them—such as
Oliver Stone,
Dustin Hoffman, and
Goldie Hawn—had worked with the two stars or were friends or clients of Fields
.

Entertainment Tonight
sent the actress
Anne Archer, a well-known Scientologist, to Germany on a “fact-finding mission
.” She later testified before the US Congress, as did other Scientology celebrities—Travolta, Corea, and
Isaac Hayes—about the suppression of religious freedom in Germany. “Individuals and businesses throughout
Germany are routinely required to sign a declaration, referred to as a ‘sect filter,’ swearing that they are not Scientologists,” Travolta told Congress. “Failure to sign means that companies will not hire them, trade unions will not admit them, they will not be permitted to join social groups, banks will not open accounts for them, and they are even excluded from sports clubs, solely because of their religion.”

In April,
John Travolta met with President
Bill Clinton at a conference on volunteerism in Philadelphia. It was a freighted moment for the president, since Travolta was portraying a character based on him
in the forthcoming movie
Primary Colors
. “He said he wanted to help
me out with the situation in Germany,” Travolta later said. “He had a roommate years ago who was a Scientologist and had really liked him, and respected his views on it. He said he felt we were given an unfair hand in that country, and that he wanted to fix it.” Clinton set up a meeting for Travolta and Cruise with
Sandy Berger, his national security advisor, who was given the additional assignment of being the administration’s “Scientology point person
.”

None of this had any effect on Travolta’s character in the film, as the movie had already been shot, nor on Germany’s policy toward the church, which refused to recognize Scientology as a religion or allow members to join political parties. However, the
US State Department began pressuring the German government on behalf of Scientology. The Germans were puzzled
that their American counterparts seemed not to know or care about the church’s
RPF camps, which the Germans called penal colonies, and the reported practices of confinement, forced confessions, and punishing physical labor, which they said amounted to brainwashing. There was a belief within the German cabinet that the church’s real goal was to infiltrate the government and create a Scientology superstate. “This is not a church
or a religious organization,” the labor minister,
Norbert Blum, told
Maclean’s
magazine. “Scientology is a machine for manipulating human beings.”

P
aul Haggis and
Deborah Rennard married in 1997, soon after
Paul’s divorce from Diane became final. Paul was still seeking joint custody of his three daughters. Without consulting him, Diane had taken
Lauren and
Katy out of the
Delphi Academy, apparently intending to enroll them in public school. Paul and Diane were ordered by the court to undergo psychiatric evaluation, a procedure that Scientology abhors. In December 1998, the court surprised everyone by awarding Paul full custody of his daughters. According to court records, the ruling followed the discovery that the girls were not enrolled in school at all.

The girls were stunned. They had watched the hostilities through Diane’s eyes. No one had prepared them for the possibility that they might be taken from her—until then, it had been the three girls and their mother against the world. The girls thought the decision was unbalanced and unfairly influenced by the fact that their father had more money.
Alissa vowed she would never speak to him again.

Haggis was also caught short by the court’s decision. In addition to the year-old son,
James, he had with Deborah, he suddenly had two teenage daughters on his hands as well. (Alissa was twenty-one at the time, and lived on her own.) The girls felt uprooted and they missed the emotional support of their mother. They didn’t resent Deborah; actually, they appreciated her advocacy and the way she balanced out Paul. Still, it was a difficult adjustment for everyone.

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.

Alissa had gone there when she was fourteen years old. It had been a mixed experience for her. She had brought a copy of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and books of eighteenth-century poetry, a CD of great speeches by Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and a pack of tarot cards. Although she loved the school, she never felt she fit in with the other kids. They wanted to talk about boys and pop culture, and she was more interested in philosophy and religion. But Delphian was just what Lauren needed. She got intensive tutoring to help her overcome her educational deficits; however, she also began to come up against some of the constraints of her church.

While she was at Delphian, Lauren decided to write a paper about religious intolerance. In particular, she felt that Scientology was under attack and she couldn’t understand why. When she went online to see what the opposition was saying, a fellow student turned her in to Ethics. Lauren was told that Scientologists shouldn’t look at negative stories about their religion. She was supposed to be saving the planet, so why was she wasting her time reading lies? Because of her isolation, and the censorship imposed on her education, when Lauren finally graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, she had never heard anyone speak ill of Scientology, nor did she question the ban on research about her religion. She thought, “I guess I’m not supposed
to do these things. I will stay away.” Like her father, she learned it was easier not to look.

Alissa had a different issue. She didn’t really date in high school, and by the time she got to junior college it began to dawn on her that she was gay. She actually wasn’t sure what that meant. She had two uncles who were gay, but for the longest time she didn’t know what a lesbian was. Then her sister Katy, who is five years younger, and had grown up in the Internet-savvy culture, came out to her parents. Paul told Katy that there was no way that he would ever love her less. That made it easier for Alissa to talk about what she was discovering about herself. The vow never to speak to her father again began to lose its hold on her.

All the girls had grown up hearing prejudiced remarks from people
in the church who saw homosexuality as an “aberration” that undermined the survival of the species; gays themselves were seen as sinister perverts. These attitudes were informed by Hubbard’s writings on the subject. But it wasn’t just Scientology, Alissa realized; the entire society was biased against homosexuals. In her early twenties, Alissa finally found the courage to come out to her father. “Oh, yeah
, I already knew that,” he told her. He said he wondered why she had ever dated boys in the first place.

“You
knew
?” she said. “I didn’t know! How did you know? Why didn’t you tell me? You could have clued me in. It would have made it easier for me.”

That was so typical of her father. He was maddening in that way, completely accepting but disengaged, as if it really didn’t matter one way or the other.

To signify her newfound identity, Alissa got a tattoo of her favorite Latin poem, the opening line of Carmen 5 by Catullus:
“Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus”
(Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love). It snaked all the way down her left arm.