Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (45 page)

Mike Rinder, former chief spokesperson for the church, in Florida, 2012

The detainees developed a particular expression whenever Miscavige came in, which he took note of. He called them “Pie Faces
.” To illustrate what he meant, Miscavige drew a circle with two dots for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. He had T-shirts made up with the pie face on it. Rinder was “the Father of Pie Faces.” People didn’t know
how to react. They didn’t want to call attention to themselves, but they also didn’t want to be a Pie Face.

In Scientology, there is a phrase that explains mob psychology:
Contagion of Aberration, meaning that groups of people can stimulate each other to do things that are insane. According to former church executives, one day Miscavige arrived at the Hole and demanded that
Marc Yager, the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, and
Guillaume Lesevre, the Executive Director of the Church of Scientology International, confess that they were homosexual lovers. He threatened that
Tom Cruise would come to “punch you guys out
” if the other Sea Org members in the Hole failed to get a confession from the two men. The captive executives took this threat seriously. When Miscavige left, a group of women executives who had been appointed as leaders of the detainees urged some of the bigger men in the Hole to “give some people some black eyes before Tom has to.” Several men dutifully beat up Lesevre and Yager. Then one of the women reported to Miscavige that the men had confessed that they were gay lovers. When
Debbie Cook, the former Captain of Flag Service Org and one of the most respected executives in the church, said that wasn’t true, she was declared a traitor. She was made to stand in a garbage can for twelve hours, as the other detainees demanded that she confess her own “homosexual tendencies
.” The women in the room repeatedly slapped her and poured water over her head. A sign was hung around her neck, saying
LESBO
.

Rathbun was seen as being COB’s chief enforcer. During meetings in the Hole or elsewhere on the base, he would stand to one side and glare at his colleagues while he says Miscavige berated and abused them. Although he was physically intimidating, Rathbun was suffering from a number of physical ailments, including a bad back, gallstones, calcium deposits in his neck, and painful varicose veins, which he believed came from having to stand at attention for hours on end. He, too, was prone to bursts of sudden violence. “Once on a phone call
I saw him get so mad that he put his fist right through a computer screen,” his former wife recalled. Miscavige would send him down to observe what was going on in the Hole and come back with reports. In January 2004, when Rinder was accused of withholding a confession from the group, Rathbun took him outside and beat him up. Rathbun says Miscavige wasn’t satisfied. He called Rathbun into his massive
office in the
Religious Technology Center, a cold and imposing room with steel walls and eighteen-foot ceilings, and accused him of letting Rinder “get away with murder
.” Then, according to Rathbun, out of nowhere, Miscavige grabbed him by the throat and slammed his head against the steel wall.
⁵
Rathbun blacked out for a moment. He wasn’t hurt, but the terms had changed.

A few days later, Rathbun found himself in the Hole, along with the entire International Management team and other executives. Miscavige said they were going to stay there until they got the Org Board done.

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. Most of the people in the Hole had a strong allegiance to the group—Scientology and the Sea Org—and they didn’t want to let their comrades down. Many had been in the Sea Org their entire adult lives and portions of their childhood.
Mike Rinder joined the Sea Org when he was eighteen.
Amy Scobee was sixteen.
Tom De Vocht was thirteen. 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.
Claire Headley married Marc when she was seventeen; by the time she was twenty-one she had been pushed to have two abortions
. She estimates that sixty to eighty percent of the women on Gold Base have had abortions. “It’s a constant practice
,” she said.
⁶

Worried about pillow talk
, Miscavige instituted a policy of imposed divorces in 2004; people in the Religious Technology Center, the
Commodore’s Messenger Organization, and
Golden Era Productions could not be married to members in other divisions. For many of those people in the Hole, everyone they knew or cared about was in the church. The cost of leaving—emotionally and spiritually, as well as financially—was forbidding. And they knew if they tried to run away, they’d likely be found and punished.

Those who attempted to leave the
Sea Org through the formal process of “routing out” would be presented with a
freeloader tab for all the coursework and counseling they had received over the years. Claire and
Marc Headley, for instance, were billed more than $150,000
when they left and told they would have to pay if they ever wanted to see their family again. Those who accept this offer can spend years paying off their debt. Those who don’t stand to lose any connection to their friends and family who remain in Scientology.

Many had long since turned their back on friends and family who were not in the church, and the prospect of facing them again brought up feelings of shame. The thought of leaving loved ones still in the church was even more fraught. All of these conflicting emotions were informed by the Scientology theory that life goes on and on, and that the mission of the church is to clear the planet, so in the scheme of things the misery one might be suffering now is temporary and negligible. There is a larger goal. One is always working for “the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics,” as Scientology ethics prescribed. And so the executives of the church who had given their lives to the Sea Org directed their confusion and their anger inward, or toward their helpless colleagues.

Rinder was an inevitable target. He was seen as being arrogant and above it all. Few people other than Rathbun really understood Rinder’s job; unlike the others, the two men were often off the base, dealing with lawyers, the government, and the press. No doubt there was resentment at work as well. The next time the Sea Org executives turned on Rinder, Rathbun exploded. He caught his friend in a headlock and slammed him to the ground, then sat astride him, pounding his head into the floor and shouting at him, nose to nose. Rinder managed to whisper, “Marty, I don’t want
to play this game anymore.”

Suddenly, Rathbun froze. Words had been spoken that broke the spell. But it was only a moment.

One evening about eight o’clock, Miscavige arrived, with his wife and his Communicator,
Shelly and
Laurisse, flanking him as usual with tape recorders in their hands. He ordered that the conference table be taken away and chairs be brought in for everyone in the Hole—about seventy people at the time, including many of the most senior people in the Sea Org. He asked if anyone knew what “musical chairs
” meant. In Scientology, it refers to frequent changes of post. About five hundred people had been moved off their jobs in the last five years, creating
anarchy in the management structure. But that wasn’t the point he was trying to make. Finally, someone suggested that it was also a game. Miscavige had him explain the rules: Chairs are arranged in a circle and then, as the players march around them, one chair is removed. When the music stops, everybody grabs a seat. The one left standing is eliminated. Then the music starts again. Miscavige explained that in this game the last person to grab a chair would be the only one allowed to stay on the base; everyone else was to be “offloaded”—kicked out of the Sea Org—or sent away to the least desirable Scientology bases around the world. Those whose spouses were not in the Hole would be forced to divorce.

While
Queen’s Greatest Hits
played on a boom box, the church executives marched around and around, then fought for a seat when the music stopped. As the number of chairs diminished, the game got more physical. The executives shoved and punched each other; clothes were torn; a chair was ripped apart. All this time, the biting lyrics of “Bohemian Rhapsody” floated over the saccharine melody:

Rathbun, with his bad back, was eliminated fairly quickly. Rinder,
De Vocht, Marc Headley—one by one, they found themselves standing alone, behind low cubicle walls, watching the surviving contestants desperately fighting to remain in the Hole rather than be sent off to God knows where. There was a clock over the door marking the hours that passed as the music played on and on then suddenly stopped and the riot began again. As people fell out of the game, COB had airline tickets for distant locations printed up for them at the base’s travel office. There were U-Haul trucks waiting outside to haul away their belongings. “Is it real to you now?
” Miscavige teased. They were told that buses would be ready to leave at six in the morning. Many were in tears. “I don’t see anybody weeping for me,” Miscavige said. The utter powerlessness of everyone else in the room was made nakedly clear to them. The game continued until 4 a.m., when a woman named
Lisa Schroer grabbed the final chair.

The next morning the whole event was forgotten. No one went anywhere.

In several legal declarations he has made over the years, Miscavige has protested, “I am the ecclesiastical leader
of the
religion
, not the Church.” The distinction is important when the church is dragged into lawsuits or threatened with criminal liability; Miscavige can point to a chart that assigns organizational responsibility to other departments, whereas the sole responsibility of the Religious Technology Center, which he heads, is to protect Scientology doctrine and literature. And yet, Miscavige freely consigned those other department heads to the Hole or sent them to RPF. During the period that the organizational chart was being constantly rearranged, the only reliable posting on the base was his, that of COB
RTC; everyone else was constantly being uprooted and repotted in other temporary assignments. There is really only one person in charge of the Church of Scientology.

A few days after the musical chairs episode, Miscavige ordered everyone in the Hole to report to
Golden Era Productions to stuff CDs into cases. At one point, he began sharply interrogating De Vocht, who was shaken and stuttered in response. According to De Vocht, Miscavige punched him in the face. He felt his head vibrate. He tried to turn away from the next blow, but Miscavige grabbed his neck and shoved him into the floor, pummeling and kicking him.
⁷
De Vocht had served Miscavige for years, and had even considered him a friend. He had dedicated his life to Scientology and had been in the Sea Org for nearly thirty years. He recalls thinking, “Now here I am, being beat up
by the top dog in front of my peers.”

After the attack, Miscavige continued his speech. De Vocht was so humiliated that he couldn’t bring himself to look at his companions. Finally, he managed a glance at them. Pie faces.

Rathbun was there, and at that moment he made a decision. As the other executives were being led back to the Hole, he slipped away and got his motorcycle and hid in the bushes. When a car finally approached, he raced through the open gate into the outside world.