Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (57 page)

Tommy Davis

When Davis finished the EPF, he replaced Rinder as chief spokesperson for the church, because Rinder was confined to the Hole. One of his first assignments was to deal with
John Sweeney, an aggressive reporter for the BBC, who was doing a story on Scientology and had been working with Rinder until then. Davis made the mistake of admitting to Sweeney that he reported to
Miscavige every day, spoiling the illusion of the leader as being unavailable and above the fray. Miscavige pulled Rinder out of the Hole and ordered him to help Davis deal with the BBC, although he added, “You’re Tommy Davis’s servant
.”

Sweeney immediately sensed that Rinder had been demoted. Rinder was “gaunt, hollow-eyed
, strange with a hint of niceness.” Tommy was now “the top dog, gleaming teeth, snappily suited, charming but creepily so.” When Sweeney refused to accede to the church’s restrictions (mainly that he agree not to use the word “cult” in his report) and began independently reporting on the accusations of defectors, he was shadowed by private investigators. A Scientology film crew showed up to document the making of the BBC documentary. Cameras were pointed at cameras. Davis appeared unannounced at Sweeney’s hotel and even traveled across the country to disrupt his interviews with Scientology dissidents. Sweeney had covered wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya, but he had never had such emotional and psychological
pressure placed upon him. During these confrontations, Rinder trailed behind Davis, staring blankly into space as Davis goaded the reporter, inches from his face. When Sweeney suggested that Scientology is a “sadistic cult
,” Davis, wearing sunglasses, checked with his cameraman to see that the camcorder was running, then said, “Now listen to me for a second. You have no right to say what is and what isn’t a religion. The Constitution of the United States of America guarantees one’s right to practice and believe freely in this country. And the definition of religion is very clear. And it’s not defined by John Sweeney. For you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory and so offensive and so bigoted. And the reason you kept repeating it is ’cause you wanted a reaction like you’re getting right now. Well, buddy, you got it! Right here, right now, I’m angry! Real angry!”

Davis turned and walked away, trailed by Sweeney, who protested, “It’s your turn to listen to me! I’m a British subject.… ”

Another confrontation took place at the
“
Psychiatry: An Industry of Death” exhibit in Hollywood. Davis once again moved in, nose to nose with Sweeney. “You’re accusing members of my religion of brainwashing!” He was referring to an earlier interview Sweeney had conducted with another Scientologist.

“No, Tommy,” Sweeney responded, his voice rising, “you were not there—”

“Brainwashing is a crime,” Davis said.

“Listen to me! You were not there! At the beginning! Of the interview!” Sweeney shouted in an oddly slow cadence. “You did not hear! Or record! The interview!”

“Do you understand that brainwashing is a crime?” Davis said, unfazed by Sweeney’s enraged screams.

Davis’s composure and his spirited defense of his church made quite a contrast with the sputtering and eventually deeply chagrined reporter, who apologized to BBC viewers on the air.

In March 2007,
John Travolta’s new movie,
Wild Hogs
, a comedy about two middle-aged men who decide to become bikers, was scheduled to open in Britain. Concerned that Sweeney would confront Travolta during the publicity for the film, Rinder and Davis planned to travel together to London, but on the day of departure, Davis failed to show up. Someone went to his room, but he was nowhere to be found. Rinder had to travel to London alone. He learned from Miscavige’s communicator that Davis had blown. Sweeney immediately sensed
that something was up and kept pestering Rinder about where Davis was. Rinder told him Davis had the flu.

As part of the film promotion, Travolta arrived at the red-carpet London premiere on a motorcycle. Sweeney was standing in the crowd in Leicester Square, well away from the star, crying out, “Are you a member of a sinister, brainwashing cult?
” Travolta’s fans shouted Sweeney down.

Later, Sweeney asked Rinder if it was true that Miscavige had beaten him, claiming to have an eyewitness.

“Who’s the witness?
” Rinder asked.

“He wishes to remain confidential because he says he is scared.”

“John, that is typical of what you do,” Rinder said.

“He says that
David Miscavige knocked you to the ground.”

“Absolute rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, not true, rubbish.”

Rinder threatened to sue if Sweeney aired such allegations. When the BBC program ran, there was no mention of physical abuse. Rinder felt that he had spared the church considerable embarrassment. But, far from being grateful, Miscavige told him that Sweeney’s piece should never have run at all. He ordered Rinder to report to an RPF facility in England. Rinder decided he’d had enough. He blew.

Davis called the church and returned voluntarily from Las Vegas, where he had been hiding.
⁵
He was sent to Clearwater, where he was
security-checked by
Jessica Feshbach. The aim of the check is to gain a confession using an E-Meter. It can function as a powerful form of thought control.

Davis and Feshbach subsequently married.

ON A RAINY MORNING
in late September 2010, I finally got my meeting with Tommy Davis. The profile of
Paul Haggis I had been preparing was nearing publication. Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, traveled to Manhattan to meet with me; my editor,
Daniel Zalewski, and
David Remnick, the editor of
The New Yorker
; the two lead fact-checkers on the story,
Jennifer Stahl and
Tim Farrington, as well as the head of the magazine’s fact-checking department,
Peter Canby; and our lawyer,
Lynn Oberlander.
Leading the Scientology legal delegation was
Anthony Michael Glassman, a former assistant US attorney who now has a boutique law firm in Beverly Hills, specializing in representing movie stars. On his website, he boasts of a $10 million judgment against
The New York Times
. The stakes were obvious to everyone.

The Scientology delegation brought with them forty-eight three-ring binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet, to respond to the 971 questions the checkers had posed. It was an impressive display. The binders were labeled according to categories, such as “Disappearance of L. Ron Hubbard,” “Tom Cruise,” “Gold Base,” and “Haggis’s Involvement in Scientology.” Davis emphasized that the church had gone to extraordinary lengths to prepare for this meeting. “Frankly, the only thing I can think that compares would be the presentation that we made in the early 1990s to the IRS.”

We sat around a large blond conference table with the kaleidoscopic lights of Times Square garishly whirling in the background. I particularly recall the Dunkin’ Donuts sign over Davis’s shoulder as he began his presentation. First, he ruled out any discussion of the church’s confidential scripture. He compared it to “shoving an image of the Prophet Mohammed in the face of a Muslim” or “insisting that a Jew eat pork.” He then attacked the credibility of some of the sources for the piece, whom he called “bitter apostates.” “They are unreliable,” he said. “They make up stories.” He produced a paper by
Bryan Wilson, who was an eminent Oxford sociologist and prominent defender of new religious movements (he died in 2004). Wilson argues that testimony from disaffected members should be treated skeptically, noting, “The apostate is generally in need of self-justification. He seeks to reconstruct his own past to excuse his former affiliations and to blame those who were formerly his closest associates.… He is likely to be suggestible and ready to enlarge or embellish his grievances to satisfy that species of journalist whose interest is more in sensational copy than in an objective statement of the truth.” Davis had highlighted the last part for my benefit.

As an example, Davis singled out
Gerald Armstrong, the former Scientology archivist, who received an $800,000 settlement in a fraud suit against the church in 1986. Davis charged that Armstrong had forged many of the documents that he later disseminated in order to discredit the church’s founder, although he produced no evidence to substantiate that allegation. He passed around a photograph of Armstrong,
which, he said, showed Armstrong “sitting naked” with a giant globe in his lap. “This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money,” Davis said. “He’s not a very sane person.”
⁶

Davis also displayed photographs of what he said were bruises sustained by
Mike Rinder’s former wife in 2010, after Rinder physically assaulted her in a Florida parking lot.
⁷
Davis then showed a mug shot of
Marty Rathbun in a jailhouse jumpsuit, after being detained in New Orleans in July 2010 for public drunkenness. “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.” Other defectors, such as
Claire and
Marc Headley, were “the most despicable people in the world.”
Jefferson Hawkins was “an inveterate liar.”

If these people were so reprehensible, I asked, how had they all arrived at such elevated positions in the church?

“They weren’t like that when they were in those positions,” Davis replied.

The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientology’s ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested that Scientology didn’t seem to be effective if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, drunks, and embezzlers.

“This is a religion,” Davis responded movingly. “It aspires to greatness, hope, humanity, spiritual freedom. To be greater than we are. To rise above our craven, humanoid instincts.” Scientology doesn’t pretend to be perfect, he said, and it shouldn’t be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. “
I
haven’t done things like that,” Davis said. “I haven’t suborned perjury, destroyed evidence, lied—contrary to what
Paul Haggis says.” He spoke of his frustration with Haggis after his resignation: “If he was so troubled and shaken on the fundamentals of Scientology … then why the hell did he stick around for
thirty-five years?” He continued: “Did he stay a closet Scientologist for some career-advancement purpose?” Davis shook his head in disgust. “I think he’s the most hypocritical person in the world.” He said he felt that he’d done all he could in dealing with Haggis over the issue of
Proposition 8. He added that the individual who had made the mistake of listing the San Diego church as a supporter of the initiative—he didn’t divulge his name—had been “disciplined” for it. I asked what that meant. “He was sat down by a staff member of the local organization,” Davis explained. “He got sorted out.”

Davis thought I was making too much out of the issue of
Suppressive Persons in the piece. “Do you know how many people, grand total, there are in the world who have been declared Suppressive?” he asked rhetorically. “A couple of thousand over the years. At most.” He said that in fact many had been restored to good standing. “Yet again, you’re falling into the trap of defining our religion by the people who’ve left.”

Hubbard had said that only two and a half percent of the human population were suppressive, but one of the problems I faced in writing about Scientology, especially its early days, is that the preponderance of people who had been close to Hubbard had either quietly left the church or been declared Suppressive. Some, like
Pat Broeker, had gone underground. Many others, like
David Mayo, had signed non-disclosure agreements. Those who remained in the church were off-limits to me.
⁸

We discussed the allegations of abuse lodged by many former members against
Miscavige. “The only people who will corroborate are their fellow apostates,” Davis said. “They’re a pack of sanctimonious liars.” He produced affidavits from other Scientologists refuting their accusations. He noted that in the tales about Miscavige, the violence always seemed to come out of nowhere. “One would think that if such a thing occurred, which it most certainly did not, there’d have to be a reason,” Davis said.

I had wondered about these outbursts as well. When Rinder and Rathbun were in the church, they claimed that allegations of abuse were baseless. Then, after Rinder defected, he said that Miscavige had beaten him fifty times. Rathbun had told the
St. Petersburg Times
in 1998 that in the twenty years he had worked closely with Miscavige,
he had never seen him hit anyone. “That’s not his temperament
,” he had said. “He’s got enough personal horsepower that he doesn’t need to resort to things like that.” Later, he acknowledged to the
Times
, “That’s the biggest lie
I ever told you.” He has also confessed that in 1997 he ordered incriminating documents destroyed in the case of
Lisa McPherson, the Scientologist who died of an embolism while under church care. If these men were capable of lying to protect the church, might they not also be capable of lying to destroy it?

However, eleven former Sea Org members told me that Miscavige had assaulted them; twenty-two have told me or testified in court that they have witnessed one or more assaults on other church staff members by their leader.
⁹
Marc Headley, one of
those who say Miscavige beat them on several occasions, said he knows thirty others who were attacked by the church leader. Rinder says he witnessed
fourteen other executives who were assaulted, some on multiple occasions, such as the elderly church president,
Heber Jentzsch, who has been in the Hole since 2006. Some people were slapped, others punched or kicked or choked. Lana Mitchell, who worked
in Miscavige’s office, saw him hit his brother,
Ronnie, in the stomach, during a meeting. Mariette Lindstein, who also worked in Miscavige’s office, witnessed as many as twenty attacks. “You get very hardened
,” she admitted. She saw Miscavige banging the heads of two of his senior executives,
Marc Yager and
Guillaume Lesevre, together repeatedly, until blood came from Lesevre’s ear. Tom De Vocht says he witnessed Miscavige striking other members of the staff about a hundred times. Others who never saw such violence spoke of their constant fear of the leader’s wrath.