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Mr
Shouty and Cruise: the rematch
He had
an infamous TV meltdown whwn last investigating scientology,
the church of Hollywood A-listers. Now John Sweeney has a defector
revealing more of the sect's dark secrets.
- http://dialogueireland.wordpress.com
- September 26, 2010
- [Texte
intégral]
Three
years ago, while making a Panorama programme about Scientology,
I made the mistake of exploding in front of the sect’s own cameras.
The embarrassing clip of film became and internet hit. Now I’ve
gone back for more.
The sequence
of events – I hope they make sense, but we are now in Scientology
world – began like this. I am in Scientology’s Psychiatry: An
Industry of Death museum on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Monsters drill into brains; sparks flash inside a skull; electrodes
clamp templates; an infant screams. The message: psychiatry
is evil.
Black
clad devotees of the Church of Scientology’s holy order, the
Sea Org, are filming my every move. Tommy Davis, a Tom Cruise
lookalike, and stone-faced Mike Rinder, head of Scientology’s
secret police, the Office of Special Affairs, chew gum and stare
at me, their jaws in sync.
I am interviewing
another senior Scientologist, Jan Eastgate, who tells me: “Psychiatrists
set up the whole euthanasia campaign in the concentration camps.
They went into the concentration camps and they set it up. And
they decided who was going to be killed.”
This is
bonkers. Some German psychiatrists did take part in the Nazi
extermination programme, but many more either fled or were murdered.
Davis,
the church’s chief spokesman, takes over from Eastgate. He’s
angry that I keep raising what the critics say. For example,
that in 1984 Mr. Justice Latey called the Church of Scientology
“a cult…corrupt, sinister and dangerous…out to capture people
and…brainwash them”.
He’s irritated,
too, that I ask about Lord Xenu, an intergalactic warlord who,
according to former Scientologists, is the secret behind the
cult. Davis says: “ None of us what you’re talking about. It’s
looney.”
Is Davis’s
anger personal? He says I have abused an Academy Award-nominated
actress – his mother, Anne Archer, the actress whose bunny got
boiled in Fatal Attraction.
The day
before, she asked me: “Do I look brainwashed to you?” Eyes lifted
to the heavens, I said nothing. She spat back: “How dare you?”
Davis
now begins to shout at me: “No, no, no. I am not stopping, you
listen to me for a second. You are accusing members of my religion
of engaging in brainwashing.”
“No, Tommy,
you stop!”
Davis:
“Brainwashing! Brainwashing is a crime!”
Now it
is me shouting: “You listen to me!” I sneak a look at my produced,
who closes her eyes, once. Oh f***.
I never
meant to shout. I apologise then, and I apologise now. I let
my team down and gave the Scientologists a PR gift from deep
space. Fool, Sweeney, fool.
The church
put my impression of an exploding tomato on the internet before
our Scientology & Me programme was broadcast in May 2007.
I looked like a raving fruitcake, not a BBC reporter.
The next
morning two kids on my street took one look at me and burst
into giggles. John Travolta phoned up the director-general,
it said in the papers, demanding my head, eight times.
Mr Shouty
went viral, millions clicking on. Some anorak on the net an
impression of me ranting about a banana. Another did Sweeney
as a Dalek. My son was jogging on a running machine at the gym
in front of a bank of TVs when his mate said: “Look at that
nutter.” Sam replied: “Er…that’s my dad.”
Exultant,
the church brought out 10,000 DVDs of me losing it and began
posting them to vicars, bank managers, people of influence.
Career-wise, I was a dead man walking.
And then
our programme when out. Viewers say the creepy private eyes
on my case, Davis drilling into me – “bigot, bigot, bigot” –
Scientologists ambushing out interviews, and a funny thing happened:
the law of unintended consequences kicked in.
The Great
British public, who pay my wages, like a laugh but they also
have a deep sense of fair play. Once they saw the full documentary,
not just the explosion but what led up to it, the emails came
in, thousands of them. Green Watch of Lambeth River fire brigade,
said: “You should have punched that chap.” (Or another word
beginning with c.)
Shortly
after the programme went out, I received a tip-off: Mike Rinder
had left the church. Three years on, my old enemy defected and
has talked to me about his former life inside the Church of
Scientology from when he was six to the moment he decided to
get out.
He told
me: “I knew, as I was walking out, that this was the last time
I would ever talk to my wife, my children, the rest of my family.
I couldn’t take it any more. When I left, I felt I had been
freed.” Sure enough, his wife, daughter, son, brother and mother
cut him out of their lives.
We discussed
my experience in 2007. Back then, the Panorama team and I were
followed by sinister black SUVs, windows tinted. Creepy strangers
kept on our tail. A private eye was at every breakfast in out
hotel in Los Angeles.
Was I
being followed? When I asked Davis, he replied “I don’t know
what you’re talking about. It seems you’re getting a bit paranoid.”
Now I
asked Rinder. Was I being paranoid? “No. You were being followed.
No doubt whatsoever.”
He says
he and Davis were doing some of the following, and reporting
back on our movements every few minutes or so to the office
of David Miscavige, Scientology’s “worldwide ecclesiastical
leader”.
Miscavige,
Cruise’s best man wgen the actor wed Katie Holmes, is even shorter
than the star; but he towers over the church. He is forever
opening new “Orgs” – part of an 11m square foot property empire
woth millions, if not billions, of dollars. The church doesn’t
say how much.
Rinder
says: “Under the leadership of David Miscavige, the church has
become the cult of David Miscavige.” He has been in charge of
it since L Ron Hubbard, the founder, died in 1986.
Rinder
claims that the messages coming from Miscavige’s office to him
and Davis while they were following us were often bizarrely
abusive. One example: “’YSCOHB’…. And then the next message
would be, ‘Well did you figure it out yet?’ That would be life
five seconds after the one before. ‘Did you figure it out yet?
Come on. Answer, answer, answer.’ And what YSCOHB stood for
was, ‘You Suck Cock On Hollywood Boulevard.’”
Through
its lawyers, he church and Miscavige deny Rinder’s allegations.
The public
face of the church is a force for good, handing out free stress
tests on Tottenham Court Road, London. Its star parishioners,
Cruise, Travolta (who flew a plane to earthquake-hit Haiti and
was filmed carrying a cardboard box), Kirstie Alley and Julliette
Lewis – help to pull in fresh recruits. The lastest pin-up is
Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olson. Probably
the biggest global catch of all is Nancy Cartwright, who plays
the voice of Bart in The Simpsons. She gave $10m to the church
three years ago.
- «There
is a VIP room for all the A-listers
- Travolta, Cruise.
- Behind
a false glass miror panel is a video camera»
Life can
be tough for Scientologists who leave. Amy Scobee spent her
life from the are of 14 in the Sea Org. When she left and started
criticising Miscavige and the church, her more intimate confidences
were leaked to the press, and the church’s Freedom magazine
labelled her “the Adultress”, accusing her of wanton sexual
behaviour.
She told
me: “The details of how I had sex with my husband before I got
married is not something that should go to a newspaper reported.
They made it the world’s business, by issuing it to the
internet and in a magazine that went to a hundred thousand or
more people. It went to all my neighbours.”
Throughout
our time in the United States making a new Panorama film about
the sect, we were again followed by agents, who filmed us silently.
I was grateful when images of me hugging Scobee at the end of
a long and, at time, upsetting series of interviews were sent
to my bosses at the BBC by the church’s lawyers, who claimed
I must be biased against the church because I was overfamiliar
with its critics. This was, in my view, a cheap slur and proof
that the agents were working from the church.
Claire
and Marc Headley joined the Sea Org when they were teenagers.
They are now out, and are fighting a legal battle for compensation
for the abuses that they say they suffered. They’ve lost the
first round because the church is officially recognised as a
religion in the United States, but they are appealing.
The Headley’s
claim that “auditing” – the Scientology confessional – was spied
on routinely. Marc says: “I installed over 100 rooms that had
two cameras and a microphone in them where people would get
auditing. In most cases, it’s inside of a smoke detector or
a picture frame, pinhole cameras.”
Marty
Rathbun, who like Rinder is now an independent Scientologist,
used to audit the stars and says: “There is a specific VIP room
for all the A-listers – John Travolta, Tom Cruise. And I audited
Tom Cruise there. There is a shelf in there that has a false
glass mirror panel – behind it there is a video camera.”
Claire
Headley told me that she saw a tape of Cruise being audited
by Rathbun: “Marty, sitting in the chair, the e-meter [an electrical
gadget used in auditing] and on the opposite side of the table
Tom Cruise, holding the cans [electrodes connected to the e-meter].
I saw those videos.” Did Cruise talk about personal things?
“Absolutely.” Things that Cruise would not want people to know?
“Absolutely.”
The church
says secrets are scrosant, but it does film auditing confessionals
for training and monitoring; it adds that filming is not done
secretly and it has been announced publicly.
Rinder,
though a “heretic” to the church, lives and breathes independent
Scientology. In a free society, he has a right to believe in
whatever he wants to believe in, and a right not to be persecuted
for his belief.
Last April
he drive his girlfriend to a medical appointment. On his own,
in the car park, he was approached by seven Scientologists,
including his wife, his daughter and his brother. One woman
screamed: “You deserted your family, you piece of s***.” His
wife screamed: “You walked out on me, you f*****.”
What the
church didn’t realise was that Rinder was on the phone to a
reporter – me. It sounded ghastly. “The intention was intimidation,”
said Rinder.
On the
day I met him in Scientology’s Mecca, Clearwater in Florida,
an enormous black SUV came up onto the very car park deck where
I had interviewed Shawn Lonsdale, a critic of Scientology, three
years before.
Two agents
got out and started filming us. The leader, wearing dark glasses,
refused to shake my hand. His message, delivered in silence,
was simple enough. Beware anyone who dares leave the church.
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