Scientology - BBC journalist John Sweeney writing for The Sunday Times

BBC journalist John Sweeney writing for The Sunday Times


Posted on September 26, 2010 by dialogueireland

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.



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.



Panorama’s The Secrets of Scientology will be screened on BBC1 at 9pm on Tuesday.