Pod Insights Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder Ep. 109 | The Disturbing Cult of Scientology About this episode Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/cccm
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What begins as a path to self-improvement has, for many former members, become a story of control, fear, and escape. This episode dives deep into the hidden world of Church of Scientology and the disturbing allegations surrounding it.
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Transcript 15,045 words · 5 speakers
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1:19 Speaker 02 Seventy-five million years ago, a galactic warlord named Xenu had a problem. His empire spanned seventy-six planets, and the population had gotten out of hand. And his solution was elegant, in a monstrous sort of way. He lured billions of people into tax offices under false pretenses, froze them in glycol, loaded them onto DC-8-shaped spacecrafts, flew them to Earth, and dropped them into volcanoes. Then, he detonated hydrogen bombs, and the souls of those billions, untethered, disoriented, and subjected to thirty-six days of electronic brainwashing,
2:04 Speaker 02 attached themselves to the only conscious beings left on the planet.
2:10 Speaker 02 Humans, people like you and me, and we've been carrying them ever since. One man claimed to have uncovered this specific history. And in the spirit of generosity, he built a church to help remove those hitchhiking souls, one by one, level by level, and for thousands upon thousands of dollars, no less. And that church is the Church of Scientology. And to understand how something like that becomes real, and becomes powerful, and becomes one of the most litigious and controversial organizations in modern history, you have to go back to the beginning.
2:53 Speaker 02 And you have to start with the man who invented it all, L. Ron Hubbard. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. Today, we are getting into Scientology. You guys wanted me to do this one so bad, and it is so crazy. I mean, if you didn't pick that up from the intro. So this, this is gonna be a wild ride. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 on the highway, slam on the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this insane cult together.
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4:49 Speaker 02 Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911, in Tilden, Nebraska. A quiet, flat town, small enough that everyone's business was everyone else's business, too. And his father, Harry Ross Hubbard, was a US Navy officer, which meant the family was always moving. Montana, to Washington DC, to the Philippines, to Guam. Young Ronald had no time to take root anywhere. And his mother, LaDora Mae Waterbury, held the household together while Harry was away. And by most accounts, the surface of Hubbard's childhood was stable and ordinary enough, if you, you know, put aside the moving everywhere constantly, which I feel like would do something to a kid. But underneath it, something was forming.
5:34 Speaker 02 And from early on, Hubbard was learning a particular skill, a very practical one at that. He was learning that the version of yourself you present to the world matters more than the truth underneath it. AKA, classic cult leader, okay? That's what we're dealing with, we already know. And he was learning how to perform. His people who knew him as a boy described him as creative, energetic, and possessed of a strange, persistent hunger for admiration. And he claimed, later in life, that he had spent his childhood studying under Native American tribal elders, and that he had been initiated into Mongolian shamanism. One of the youngest people ever to achieve it, he claims.
6:17 Speaker 02 And he also claimed to have traveled extensively through Asia, immersing himself in Buddhist philosophy and Far Eastern mysticism. None of it was documented, and the only evidence shows a boy Being shuttled between naval postings with his father. But documentation for Hubbard was always somewhat besides the point. You know, it kind of always is for a cult leader. It's always like, I'm just the middleman to the guy upstairs. Or like, I just received all this information on gold tablets by this angel, but nobody else can see them or whatever, you know? It's just all that kind of stuff. So in 1930 Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to study civil engineering.
7:00 Speaker 02 And he withdrew two years later after failing physics and underperforming across subjects that required things like evidence and verifiable results. Because he doesn't like that, remember? He just likes to make stuff up and have everybody not ask questions about it. And he would later claim multiple academic credentials, including expertise in nuclear physics, the same subject he had failed as an undergraduate. And people who encountered him in this period described someone who could dominate a room despite his failings. And he was verbally fast and entertaining and told stories about himself that were almost always larger than the circumstances warranted. And former colleagues in the science fiction world described him as just being magnetic.
7:43 Speaker 02 The charm by most accounts was real. And he joined the US Naval Reserve in 1941, following Pearl Harbor, and was commissioned as a lieutenant. And the Church of Scientology's official biography describes Hubbard as a decorated war hero, a wounded combat veteran, and a brilliant naval commander. And the US Navy's own records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, tell a considerably different story, though. Which is unsurprising at this point. We're going to keep the same theme here. He's going to say something, and then we're going to find out it's bullshit, basically. And in four and a half years of service Hubbard was relieved of command. Twice. The most famous episode involves May 1943, when Hubbard supposedly attacked a Japanese
8:28 Speaker 02 submarine off the coast of Oregon. And the Navy's official review found that he had been firing at a known magnetic deposit on the ocean floor. He had shot- At a rock and written it up as victory. That's crazy. And he also directed his ship into Mexican territorial waters without authorization, which escalated into a diplomatic incident. And he later claimed 21 medals and decorations, but official records document four, and none of them were combat achievements. And he claimed he had been blinded and crippled by war wounds and that he healed himself through techniques that would later become dianetics.
9:11 Speaker 02 But his medical records showed treatment for ulcers and conjunctivitis. And the Navy noted his complaints were largely psychosomatic. So before the war, Hubbard had actually married a woman named Polly Grubb, and they would have two children together. And in 1946, while still legally married to Polly, he married his second wife, Sarah Northrup. And by legal definition, that was bigamy. And Polly was left to manage the fallout from a marriage that was still technically in effect while her husband had just simply moved on because that, that's just how he felt. He just kind of did whatever he felt like, just like thought he could get away with it. But she received no particular acknowledgement of this in any church biography.
9:54 Speaker 02 And the pattern is worth noting early because it repeats itself at every scale. He took what he wanted, constructed a more flattering version of what had happened, and left others to deal with the wreckage. Just a classic, classic narcissist. If, if anything, he's absolutely just a narcissist. Probably a pathological liar, too. We could, I think we could assume. And he did this with women, with money, and with the truth as we, as we see it. And he would do it soon on a much larger scale. So before and between his military years, Hubbard had another career. Pulp fiction writer, science fiction, adventure, westerns. He wrote them all, under his own name and a collection of pseudonyms.
10:39 Speaker 02 And the pay was a penny a word. So, volume was everything. So he's really, okay, let's, let's just look at this. He's really good at making up stories, really good at lying. Really good at fast talking and being really charming. Guys, this is the perfect recipe for our cult leader still. And for the craziest lore of any cult ever, I have to give him that. If anything, I will give him that, you know? But I digress, let's get into it. Because he was remarkably fast at producing hundreds of thousands of words per year. Quality was understandably a casualty of that pace. But the science fiction community knew him, and the more generous among them remembered him as a gifted storyteller.
11:24 Speaker 02 And he was also known for embellishing, as we know, not just in his fiction, but his own life story, which grew with each retelling like a fish that just kept getting bigger and fatter and bigger until they can't swim anymore. And what's worth paying attention to, looking back, is the architecture of his stories. Because in his 1938 story, Slaves of Sleep, characters carry memories from traumatic experiences in previous lives, unable to escape what their past selves set in motion. And the reactive mind of Dionetics, the idea that past trauma drives present suffering, is the same concept with different vocabulary, essentially, as we'll see.
12:07 Speaker 02 And in the old doc Methuselah series, the central character belongs to a secret brotherhood of near immortal beings with capabilities ordinary humans can never access. And the operating Thetan, Scientology's elite spiritual being at the top of the bridge, is the same character in different clothes, as we will come to see. And in Final Blackout, a singular leader rises through superior knowledge and sheer force of will, commanding total loyalty from his followers. And immortal spirits trapped in physical bodies, past life trauma accumulating across reincarnations. And ancient alien civilizations operating on cosmic timescales. These were just genre conventions.
12:52 Speaker 02 Because Hubbard was rehearsing the architecture of a belief system he would later sell as revelation. And some Where in these years, he reportedly made an observation that has been attributed to him by multiple science fiction contemporaries, that the most efficient route to real money was to start a religion. And the exact phrasing has never been nailed down. Some say it was at a convention, some say a bar, and some say to a specific editor. But nobody disputes what he did next. So to understand what comes next, you need to know about a man named Jack Parsons.
13:32 Speaker 02 Born Marvel Whiteside Parsons, he was a self-taught rocket engineer who never finished his degree, and yet became a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And he pioneered a solid rocket fuel formula foundation to modern aerospace. And he was also a completely devoted practitioner of thelemic occultism, which is a philosophical and religious system built around the belief that every individual's true will was the supreme law of the universe. And its founding organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis, it's a mouthful of words, worked through a graduated series of initiatory levels, each unlocking more esoteric knowledge
14:17 Speaker 02 than the last. Does this make sense? No? I think that's why it is what it is. You just hear a lot of words and you're like, "Yeah, okay, that sounds cool." You know? I feel like it's just meant to confuse people. But if that structure sounds at all familiar, it should, because Parsons ran the OTO's Agap Lodge out of his large mansion in Pasadena. So it was part commune, part laboratory, part ritual space. And it attracted artists, scientists, occultists, and bohemians from all directions. And it attracted Hubbard immediately.
14:58 Speaker 02 So Hubbard moved in during the summer of 1945, and he wasted no time making himself at home, including with Parsons' girlfriend. Made himself a little too at home, if you know what I'm saying. And this would be Sarah Northrup, who he would marry later, as we spoke about. So in early 1946, Parsons and Hubbard undertook a series of thelemic rituals known as the Babylon Working. And the goal was to summon an elemental companion for Parsons. Now Parsons conducted the operations while Hubbard took notes and directed the sequences. And shortly after the rituals concluded, a woman named Marjorie Cameron appeared in Parsons' life.
15:41 Speaker 02 And he was convinced they had succeeded. So when Aleister Crowley, the system's British founder, heard about all of this from England, he was unimpressed. And he told his colleagues that Parsons had lost his mind and that Hubbard's involvement was particularly embarrassing. And almost on cue, Hubbard left, taking Sarah Northrup, his yacht now, because he's got a yacht, and a significant portion of Parsons' savings with him. So he stole his girl and his savings and a yacht. Who is this guy? And he called it a business venture. And Parsons pursued legal action and recovered some of the money in the future. But Jack Parsons died on June 17, 1952,
16:25 Speaker 02 when an explosion tore through his home in Pasadena. Now, the ruling was accidental, but who knows, you know? But Hubbard didn't leave Pasadena with Parsons' beliefs, because they're Parsons' beliefs, right? And he's a narcissist, so he's got to make up his own shit. He left with an education, essentially. And he had watched how rituals could manufacture psychological states. And he had seen how mystery and staged revelation could hold intelligent people in place. But he took these intelligent people, binding them to a system they couldn't fully disapprove. And he had been taking notes the entire time. And four years later, those notes would have a title,
17:10 Speaker 02 a publisher, and of course, a price tag. "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health" was published on May 9, 1950. And within weeks, it was a bestseller. And within months, it was a cultural phenomenon. And within a year, it had sold over 150,000 copies and launched Dianetics Clubs across the country. And the book's central claim was that the human mind operates on two separate tracks. The first is the analytical mind, rational, near-perfect, a flawless computing system. And the second is the reactive mind, an unconscious storage bank of painful memories called engrams.
17:55 Speaker 02 Now, these engrams, according to Hubbard, were the source of all human suffering, all irrationality and all psychosomatic illness. And they functioned below conscious awareness, causing fear and compulsion the person couldn't explain. And the solution was a process called auditing, where a trained practitioner would guide a subject through their painful memories, having them re-experience each one repeatedly until the emotional charge dissolved entirely. And when the reactive mind was fully cleared, the person became what Hubbard called a, quote, "clear." Sure, dude. Now, a clear, Hubbard promised, would have near-perfect memory, enhanced intelligence
18:40 Speaker 02 and immunity from psychosomatic illness. And Hubbard declared this science. And he gave it a clinical vocabulary, precise procedures and scientific-sounding apparatus to go with it. But there was just one little, tiny, little problem. Uh, it wasn't, ah, it wasn't, it wasn't science. It was just made up. Shocker. Because the regression technique he described had existed for over 50 years in hypnotherapy practice. Because that all probably sounded familiar to you. I've talked about that type of therapy in, in some deep dives I've done before. It's not new.
19:22 Speaker 02 It's very much already a thing, except for, you know, enhancing intelligence and, you know, having a perfectly clear mind. And not being able to have any sort of psychosomatic illness, that's all bullshit. But the relative therapy part is already something that exists. Because the reactive mind was structurally identical to the unconscious as described by Freudian psychoanalysis. And what he added was just new vocabulary and the promise that ordinary people could apply it to each other without professional training, which is you just can't do that. And the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association both reviewed Dianetics, and the claims were untestable.
20:04 Speaker 02 The neuroscience incompatible with what science actually knew about how memory works. And no controlled study existed to support any of it. And the definition of a "clear" was unfalsifiable almost by design. Because he publicly exhibited his first "clear" in August of 1950 before an audience of scientists and journalists in Los Angeles. And the "clear" was a young woman named Sonia Bianca, who was unable to recall basic physics formulas she had claimed to have memorized. And the audience was not persuaded. But the book kept selling anyway. Because people didn't care really about the science, they just cared about the idea.
20:46 Speaker 02 So by 1952, the original Dianetics Foundation had gone bankrupt. Mismanagement, organizational chaos, and Hubbard's own tendencies had collapsed it. And he even temporarily lost the rights to the Dianetics name. And a bankruptcy court had taken his movement, so he just built a new one. And this time on ground no court could seize. So in 1952, he introduced the concept of the "Thetan," the immortal individual soul. Human beings, Hubbard now claimed, were not just minds with problems. They were ancient spiritual entities who had existed for trillions of years, accumulating damage across the millennia.
21:31 Speaker 02 The reactive mind was still there, but it was now just the beginning. A small stepping stone into a far more cosmic Drama, and crucially, a self-help business could go bankrupt. But a religious one could not. Because religious organizations operated under different legal frameworks. Frameworks Hubbard had studied carefully because these religions got tax exemption, regulatory protection. A church wasn't selling a product that didn't work. It was practicing the freedom of religion. What could go wrong? So every dollar tied went to the church, not to a product that could be FDA-regulated. It wasn't a spiritual calling.
22:15 Speaker 02 It was a legal strategy. So this entire religion, like some others, was entirely made up just to get tax-free money, essentially, and so his little cult couldn't be poofed in front of his face. And probably just for his ego in general. So in 1953, Hubbard wrote a letter to a colleague explicitly advising the reframing of the organization as a religion and listing its financial and legal advantages in his own handwriting. And that letter has been extensively verified. And the Church of Scientology's entire legal identity rests on the argument that it is a sincere religious movement.
22:59 Speaker 02 And Hubbard's own handwritten letter cataloging the tax and legal upside of calling itself a church makes that argument considerably harder to sustain. Kind of sounds like bullshit, honestly. But the Church of Scientology was officially incorporated in Los Angeles in 1954. And here is the architecture of the beliefs, right? So in Scientology, you are not your body and you are not your mind. You are a Thetan, an immortal spiritual being who has existed for trillions of years. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? It's meant to be. And because of that unimaginable span of time, you have accumulated spiritual damage. Oh, no!
23:43 Speaker 02 False memories, diminished capabilities, trauma layered across lifetimes. And Scientology's purpose was to restore You to your original state of total freedom and limitless capability. And the tone scale was Hubbard's numerical hierarchy of emotional states, running from negative forty, which is death, at the bottom, to forty, which is serenity of beingness at the top. So negative forty and forty. Scientologists were trained to evaluate themselves and everyone around them on this specific scale. And this was in order to identify who was safe to be around and who was not. And in Hubbard's own writing, people operating at the lower end of the scale
24:28 Speaker 02 are described as dangerous suppressors of other's survival, people who should be removed from your life. So it functions essentially as a social credit system for deciding who belongs in your world. And that brings us to the Bridge to Total Freedom, which was the path through it all. A sequential program of courses and audition sessions, each level requiring payment before you could advance to the next naturally. Payment, you know, tithing, untaxable tithing. And at the lower levels, you were addressing the N-grams dianetics identified. And at the upper levels, you were handling ancient spiritual entities attached to your body and unlocking knowledge
25:11 Speaker 02 of events in Scientology's deep cosmological history. And this is the genius of the architecture, though, because it really, honestly, is kind of genius. Because the further you climbed, the more you knew. And the more you knew, the more special you felt. And don't we all just want to feel special? You know, that's all, we're all the main characters in our own life and we want to be the best main character we can be. So Hubbard was just like, make everyone think they're special, but they're actually fucking stupid. Am I right? I'm just kidding. But no, that's actually what he thought. Because the more special you feel, the harder it is to imagine walking away. And every level was another achievement,
25:54 Speaker 02 another step toward a truth that outsiders or even members who hadn't gone as far could Never access. So it exploited something fundamental in us all, just the human desire for hidden knowledge. The thrill of being among the few who understand what others cannot. It wasn't about intelligence, it was about belonging to a secret club where the revelations never stopped coming. AKA occult, okay? And if you started doubting, you had already spent thousands of dollars and years of your life getting there. So leaving meant admitting all of that was gone. So it wasn't a trap for stupid people, it was a trap for curious ones.
26:39 Speaker 02 And then there was the E-meter and the art of auditioning. Now, the electro psychometer, the E-meter, I'm gonna say, is two metal cylinders connected by wires to a circuit. And you hold one in each hand. And when the electrical conductivity of your skin changes, which happens when your sweat glands activate, which can happen for any number of reasons, including nervousness, discomfort, or simply just being a little hot, a needle deflects on a dial. And it is, at its core, the same underlying technology as a polygraph machine, if you're familiar with those. It's like a lie detector machine, you know? And Scientology claims it measures the mass and motion of mental material,
27:24 Speaker 02 AKA the energy content of N grams in stored spiritual matter, AKA bullshit, okay? The FDA ruled in the 1960s that it had no demonstrated therapeutic value. And independent scientific analysis has consistently found it measures galvanic skin response and literally nothing more. And what makes auditing genuinely powerful and genuinely dangerous is what happens to everything said in that room. Every secret, every fear, every dark memory, every transgression is recorded. And every session, across every level, logged and archived, remember that? Former members have testified extensively that this information was used-
28:10 Speaker 02 As leverage blackmail, right? Because if you decided to leave the church, the church would use what you had disclosed against you. So the intimacy of auditing was very real. And so was the mechanism underneath it. The confessional functioned as surveillance, and none of it happened by accident. And everything about Scientology was built the way it was for a reason. And the reason all traced back to the psychology of the man who designed it.
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29:10 Speaker 02 Hubbard's personal finances were unusual for the leader of a nonprofit religious organization. And former members described watching large cash deliveries personally received by him. What? A cult leader taking all the money for himself? I've never heard of such a thing. Investigators documented flows of organizational money into his personal accounts. And he lived very well while Sea Org members earned $10 a week. And we'll get into the Sea Org people in a minute. And the internal culture of Scientology increasingly reflected its founder. The paranoia, the conviction that the outside world was fundamentally hostile, the belief that the mission was important enough to justify extraordinary measures.
29:55 Speaker 02 And he was not reacting to outside threats. He was just building the response infrastructure before the threats could even materialize. So he was just, he was doomsday prepping, essentially. So in October 1967, Hubbard issued a formal policy letter introducing the status of "suppressive person", an enemy of the church, a threat to Scientology's survival. And he was very specific. about what could be done to them. And the fair game policy stated that a suppressive person may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. So basically, anybody could do anything to them without being held responsible for it.
30:40 Speaker 02 So they could be, in Hubbard's own words, tricked, sued, lied to, or destroyed, whatever that means. And this was not a metaphor. It was official church policy. And in October of 1968, following public backlash, Hubbard issued a follow-up order retiring the phrase "fair game." And he was careful to note that the change only affected the terminology and the underlying treatment of suppressive persons was to continue unchanged. And one of the most documented early applications involved a journalist named Paulette Cooper, who published a book about Scientology in 1971. And what followed was a multi-year campaign against her.
31:25 Speaker 02 Bomb threats were made in her name, and an operation was run with the explicit goal of having her criminally indicted for those same threats. And the campaign had an official name inside The Guardian's office, and it was Operation Freakout. Pretty lame name to me, but what do I know? And the stated purpose overall was written down by Hubbard himself, and it was to, quote unquote, harass and discourage rather than to win. And the documents detailing all of this were among the 48,000 files the FBI seized years later. And courts in multiple jurisdictions have found the fair game policy to be real and to have been applied against real people across decades.
32:08 Speaker 02 And the church continues to deny its existence, and as recently as 2023, former member Leah Rimini filed a lawsuit citing ongoing fair game harassment, surveillance, smear campaigns, coordinated contact with her employers and family. And the tactics described are identical to what Hubbard put in writing in 1967.
32:30 Speaker 02 The name was just retired, but the policy was not. But then there is the Sea Org, which I mentioned briefly before, and now we're gonna talk about. So in 1967, Hubbard resigned from his formal positions in Scientology's organizational structure and took to the water. And he established a floating headquarters aboard a fleet of ships, eventually centered on the flagship vessel Apollo. Literally became Waterworld out there, swear to God. The stated reason was philosophical, of course. Freedom from any single government's jurisdiction and the ability to pursue advanced operating threat and research without interference.
33:11 Speaker 02 Basically, he just wanted to get away from the law and just be able to do whatever he wants. And, you know, the waters are lawless. They're not actually lawless, but you can get away with a lot more on the water, basically. So the more observable reason was that Hubbard was facing growing scrutiny from multiple governments framing every conflict as a coordinated psychiatric conspiracy, using external pressure to deepen internal loyalty. And he was actually banned from reentering the United Kingdom in 1968. So international waters were just a little bit more hospitable than any shore at this point. And the Sea Organization was formally established in 1967 as Hubbard's elite corp, a paramilitary
33:56 Speaker 02 structure of Scientology's most devoted members, living and working aboard ships under rigid discipline, like a bunch of weird pirates or whatever, that believe in that they were just aliens that were put on Earth in volcanoes and like were mystical beings or whatever. So working days routinely ran 14 to 16 hours, and members wore naval-style uniforms and operated under a hierarchy of ranks. And their salary was $10 a week. Damn! Even for that time, that's really bad. And the Sea Org, or Sea Organization, members signed contracts of service for
34:35 Speaker 02 Wait for it. A billion years. They signed a contract to work for a billion years because remember they're they're trillion year olds beings. So what a shitty contract 10 bucks, although 10 bucks a week for a billion years. That adds up. But and it was not figuratively. It was literally the same commitment across every future lifetime essentially. And children as young as six were signing these contracts. By the way, and adults who grew up on the ships described childhoods of grinding labor, constant ideological pressure and fear of discipline that hovered over everything they did. And one of Hubbard's preferred punishments was having members thrown overboard into
35:20 Speaker 02 the harbor, sometimes from the upper deck, which is a considerable fall in front of the entire crew, mind you. And Sea Org members who committed serious infractions were assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force or the RPF. And that included hard physical labor, restricted diet, isolation from others and intensive re-indoctrination sessions that could last months or years. And for those who failed to progress in the regular RPF, there was the RPF's RPF, which was a program within the program, more restrictive and even more isolated. And the siege mentality Hubbard built on those ships did not stay at sea.
36:02 Speaker 02 And when the church would eventually return to land, it came back with a plan. So Operation Snow White was the largest known infiltration of the United States government by a private organization in American history. That is bonkers. Okay. Cause it wasn't a foreign intelligence service, which you'd expect, not a criminal cartel. It was a church. And beginning in the early 1970s, the Guardian's office inserted operatives into approximately 136 government agencies and organizations across the United States. They got busy on the water and they made a serious plan. Okay. Infiltrating the government is insane.
36:45 Speaker 02 And this was organizations in the United States and in 30 other countries with an estimated force of up to 5,000 people at various points. And the stated objective was to locate and destroy what the church calls "false reports" about Scientology in government files. And the method was to place agents inside those agencies who would steal the documents. And the operatives obtained legitimate employment inside the IRS and other federal agencies, and they photographed files, removed records, and systematically purged documentation unfavorable to the church. This is crazy, they expunged themselves. And the operation was authorized at the highest levels of the church, including, obviously,
37:30 Speaker 02 by Hubbard and Hubbard's own wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, who served as Controller of the Guardian's office. But it began to unravel in 1976 when an operative named Michael Mezner was recognized by a federal employee. And by mid-1977, under pressure and fearing for his safety, he turned himself in to the FBI and became a government witness. So on July 8th, 1977, the government responded. And simultaneous raids on church offices in Los Angeles and Washington DC resulted in a seizure of over 48,000 documents. And by 1979, 11 senior church officials had been convicted, including Mary Sue Hubbard, Hubbard's wife at the time.
38:15 Speaker 02 And she was sentenced to five years, but only served one. And L. Ron Hubbard himself was named as an unindicted co-conspirator, but was never charged. Huh. I feel like money was involved in that, but what do I know? You know? But essentially, he was hiding and unreachable. And the church's public response was to characterize the convicted executives as rogue actors who had operated without authorization. And the 48,000 documents suggested otherwise, though. And Hubbard had already made himself impossible to find before any of it started to fall apart. So by the mid-1970s, Hubbard had effectively vanished from visible ...leadership, communicating through written directives and operating through trusted lieutenants.
39:00 Speaker 02 And legally vulnerable as a named co-conspirator, he refused to surface though, so they're like, "Ah, we can't find him. I guess he can get away with it, that's fine. At least a little tsk tsk, I guess." But from roughly 1979 until his death in 1986, he lived in a series of isolated locations under different names. And his final years were spent primarily in a motorhome at a remote ranch in Creston, California, accompanied by a small handful of trusted staff. And he continued to issue HCOBs, or Hubbard Communications Office bulletins, formal policy directives that the church treated as scripture, essentially. But his instructions kept arriving by paper, and his photograph was everywhere inside church
39:44 Speaker 02 facilities, not unlike Jesus Christ in Christian churches. And his lectures played constantly. And his physical absence somehow made him feel more authoritative, not less, because you can't argue with words on a page. But in his absence, power inside the church was steadily consolidating around a young man named David Miscavige, who had positioned himself as Hubbard's gatekeeper, ensuring that Hubbard could only reach his own organization through him. So on January 24th, 1986, L. Ron Hubbard died at the Creston Ranch, at the age of 74. And the official cause was stroke.
40:26 Speaker 02 And the San Luis Obispo County coroner's toxicology report found Vistral in his system, which is an anti-anxiety medication and a psychiatric drug. And Scientology members were forbidden from taking psychiatric medication. Oop, looks like he didn't listen to his own rules. Shocker. But his death was not publicly announced for three days. And during those days, a small group within the church was managing the transition. And during this time, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the sea, of course. And there was no public funeral. And members were told that Hubbard had voluntarily left his body to continue his research in ...in the freer state and that the highest level operating Thatten had simply chosen to move on.
41:11 Speaker 02 And members who found this explanation incomplete were not given any other options. And control of his estate, the writings, trademarks, and intellectual property of the entire religion, was passed to David Miscavige, who had been positioning himself for exactly this moment for five years now. And he, at the time, was 25 years old, and he remains the leader of Scientology till today. Now, David Miscavige was born on April 30, 1960, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and he joined the C organization at 16 reportedly with his parents' blessing. And his father, Ron Miscavige Sr., was a Scientologist and eventually a C org member himself, so ran in the family, basically.
41:56 Speaker 02 And people who knew Miscavige as a young C org member described someone unusually driven, unusually effective, and unusually willing to do whatever was required to advance. And he caught Hubbard's attention and was brought in as a personal assistant pretty quickly on, pretty soon after he joined. And by 1981, Miscavige had engineered the removal of the watchdog committee, the church's nominal governing body in Hubbard's absence, and replaced it with a structure he controlled. And he forced the resignation of Mary Sue Hubbard, Hubbard's own wife, from the Guardian's office. And by the time Hubbard died in 1986, no credible alternative to Miscavige had emerged,
42:40 Speaker 02 and he just became chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center, the body controlling all Scientology trademarks and copyrights. And multiple former senior executives who worked directly under Miscavige for decades have described a leadership style defined by micromanagement, volcanic rage, and regular physical violence. And the Tampa Bay Times' Truth rundown investigation in 2009 reported that Miscavige routinely struck members of his senior staff, sometimes during meetings, as an ordinary feature of life at the church's internet. And former Inspector General Marty Rathbun, former international spokesman Mike Rinder,
43:21 Speaker 02 and others from Miscavige's direct inner circle provided consistent accounts to multiple journalists and in multiple legal proceedings. And the church called every single one of them a disgruntled apostate motivated by vengeance. And there was a great many disgruntled apostates with remarkably similar stories, though. And Miscavige's own father, Ron Miscavige Sr., published a memoir in 2016 titled Ruthless. And he described the church spending approximately $10,000 per week to surveil him after he left. And he described, on camera, suffering a cardiac episode while still inside the church, and being told that David had decided to wait and see whether his father survived on
44:04 Speaker 02 his own before intervening. What a fucking monster! Wait, that's it? No. Sorry, I know the background changed and I changed, it's a different day. Just saying, it's a different day, basically. Anyway, let me continue. And then there was Michelle, or Shelley Barnett, who was actually born into Scientology. And her mother, Florence, or Flo Barnett, was a longtime member and eventually a senior church official. And growing up, Shelley's entire world was the church, her community, her education, her social circle, and her sense of purpose. And to understand what happened to Shelley, you first have to understand what happened to her mother.
44:46 Speaker 02 So by the mid-1980s, Flo Barnett, Shelley's mother, had fallen out of favor with church leadership. And the reasons have never been fully documented, but the result was definitive. She was declared a "suppressive person." Very bad! And under disconnection policy, that meant her own daughter, now married to the most powerful man in Scientology, was required to cut off all contact with her. Now Shelley and David disconnected from Flo entirely. A mother declared an enemy erased from her daughter's life by institutional decree. Extremely sad. And that's a- September 25th, 1985, Florence Barnett would be found dead in her Los Angeles home.
45:31 Speaker 02 Now, the ruling was suicide, and it was allegedly by gunshot. Three shots specifically, though, to the head and to her chest. So, gonna safely say, I'm not buying it. And it was also with a rifle. Forensic investigators noted with some understatement, the obvious physical difficulty of that entire scenario. And the ruling was not challenged, for whatever reason, and it was just quietly filed away. And Shelley had been cut off from her mother before she died, and whether she was permitted to grieve, or how, is not something the church has ever addressed.
46:14 Speaker 02 Now Shelley and David Miscavige had married in 1982, and she wasn't simply the leader's wife. By the late 1990s and the early 2000s, she was one of the most powerful operational figures in the entire church, effectively running day-to-day administration at the international headquarters in Hemet, California, known internationally as "The Gold Base." And people who worked alongside her described someone as driven and as capable as her husband. She was not by any means a peripheral figure. She was a co-architect of the institution. And somewhere around 2005 or 2006, something changed. And former members have described an incident in which Shelley made a series of personal
46:59 Speaker 02 reassignments without David's explicit authorization, filing positions on her own initiative. And in an organization where Miscavige's control was absolute and unquestioned, that is David's, that is, that was not a small thing. This was very bad. And she was removed from her position because of that, allegedly. And she was removed quietly, and then she was just gone. And the last confirmed public sighting of Shelley Miscavige was in August of 2007, when she was briefly escorted to her father's funeral and she has not appeared publicly since and she is
47:40 Speaker 02 not seen at church events and she does not give interviews and she does not appear in photographs either and former senior members who worked at the highest levels of the church for decades say they don't even know where she is and in 2013 actress and former member Leah Rimini filed a missing persons report with the Los Angeles Police Department citing genuine concern for Shelley's well-being and the LAPD conducted a welfare check and issued a terse statement Shelley Miscavige had been located and was not a missing person and no other details were provided though no photograph and no public statement from
48:20 Speaker 02 Shelley herself and no independent verification of any kind but the church's position is that she is alive and well and engaged in church work of her own choosing and former members familiar with church operations believe she is held at a remote church facility in the mountains of San Bernardino County one of the several isolated properties the church owns and controls accessible only through church channels monitored by church staff and she has a family outside the church and they have not been able to reach her either though and there have been no letters no calls and no contact that anyone outside
49:00 Speaker 02 the organization has been able to independently confirm so Shelley Miscavige is depending on whom you ask either a dedicated senior church official living exactly as she chooses or which I'm leaning more to a woman who has not been seen by anyone outside Scientology's control in nearly two decades whose disappearance has never been fully accounted for and whose family has no way of knowing if she is okay and this theory also poses that she might just not even be alive we don't know and I don't think we ever will know and that is horrifying especially given what happened to her mother which is
49:45 Speaker 02 Complete BS. Someone killed her. Maybe, I have to say maybe, because I don't know for sure, you know? But three shots to the head and chest, are you kidding me? With a rifle? Are you kidding me? But the church confirms Shelley is alive and she has not appeared anywhere to confirm it herself. So do with that what you will. But that brings us to the IRS war and the tax exemption victory. Now, the IRS had stripped Scientology's tax exempt status in 1967. And the reason was pretty straightforward. Organizational money was flowing directly into L. Ron Hubbard's personal accounts, conveniently enough for
50:26 Speaker 02 him. And that was true, and the IRS would document it. And what followed was a war that lasted 26 years. And the church's response was not to make their case in court, it was to make the IRS's life as unlivable as possible, which I didn't even know was possible. And they filed approximately 2,000 lawsuits, not against the IRS as an institution, but against individual IRS employees. And the goal was not victory, it was just exhaustion. But it is one thing to sue a large agency, but it is something more intimate and more
51:06 Speaker 02 frightening to sue the individual person who works there. That is bold as hell. But as we know, the people in Scientology are the most bold people ever, it seems. But private investigators were deployed against IRS personnel even. And operatives showed up at private meetings, and the pressure was just relentless and very personal. And in October of 1991, David Miscavige and Inspector General Marty Rathbun walked into IRS headquarters unannounced. And they met privately with the IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg Jr. And the details of that conversation have never been fully disclosed. But on October 1, 1993,
51:47 Speaker 02 the IRS granted Scientology tax exempt status. What the hell did they say?
51:55 Speaker 02 That room and how can I get in on that? You know what I mean? I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'll pay my taxes, whatever, whatever, dude. But seriously, like, that is so incredibly shady. Oh, my God. And it wasn't just tax exempt for the church itself, but 153 associated entities as well. And the church paid 12.5 million dollars and all 2,200 outstanding lawsuits just disappeared. And every tax liability was gone. And the agreement was kept secret until December 1997, when the Wall Street Journal obtained and published the 76-page closing document.
52:38 Speaker 02 And tax law experts described the terms as extraordinary. And every tax liability was just gone. And the agreement was kept secret until December 1997, when the Wall Street Journal obtained and published the 76-page closing document. And tax law experts described the terms as extraordinary. A 26-year war that the IRS appeared to be winning had been resolved in a single private meeting. And inside the church, it was treated as proof of divine favor. I'm gonna go ahead and assume it was probably blackmail or something along those lines, but what do I know? When the government settled, Miscavige turned to a strategy Hubbard had first outlined 38 years earlier.
53:23 Speaker 02 And that was celebrities. Now Hubbard identified celebrities as priority targets as far back as 1955. And he called them opinion leaders. I don't think anybody wants a celebrity's opinion these days, but different time. But basically, people whose public endorsement shapes what ordinary people believe. And in 1969, the church opened Celebrity Center International in Los Angeles, a separate facility built specifically for public figures, offering better amenities, more attentive staff, and materially different experience than what regular members received. Just basically regular. Life, it seems, because why treat normal people good, you know?
54:09 Speaker 02 Unbelievable. But it was because regular members weren't the marketing department. Right? They weren't selling anything. The celebrities can sell. And the biggest one that you probably already know of is Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is the church's most valuable asset and has been for 40 years. And he was introduced to Scientology by his first wife, Mimi Rogers, in the mid 1980s, and became a devoted member almost immediately, forming a close, personal friendship with David Miscavige that had been described by former insiders as "the most important relationship in the church's modern era." And the two men reportedly vacation together, share meals, and speak constantly.
54:53 Speaker 02 This makes me not like Tom Cruise. This makes me really not like Tom Cruise now that I've learned a lot more about this. And it's a bummer because, you know, I like Mission Impossible. I like that he does stunts. But this puts a big damper on that. Now, Miscavige has been called Cruise's best friend by multiple sources. And what that friendship has meant for the church is immeasurable because Cruise's endorsement gave Scientology a cultural legitimacy it had never previously achieved. And his second marriage to Nicole Kidman presented a problem. Former senior members have described church concerns that Kidman, whose father was a psychologist,
55:35 Speaker 02 a profession Scientology treats with hostility, rightfully so, was pulling Cruise away from his commitment. They can't have that. They can't have little bitty Tommy Cruise leave the party. So his auditing files, some former officials have alleged, were reviewed for material that could be used to manage the relationship. And the marriage ended in 2001. And Kidman was subsequently described in church circles as a suppressive person. Who else was a suppressive person? Oh, yeah. That was Shelley's mom, who was murdered.
56:15 Speaker 02 Allegedly, and Cruz's children from that marriage, who remained with him and were raised in Scientology, disconnected from their mother for a significant period, which is incredibly disturbing. And after the divorce, according to multiple former members and journalists who investigated the story, church officials effectively helped Cruz audition for a new girlfriend. A Scientologist actress named Nazanin Boniati, who was reportedly selected, briefed and introduced to Cruz in late 2004 under circumstances she did not fully understand. And the relationship ended after several months, and she was later
56:55 Speaker 02 assigned to the RPF, which remember is bad, that's bad. And she has spoken about the experience publicly. And Cruz then met Katie Holmes in 2005. And their relationship, documented partly by the now infamous couch jumping in Oprah, partly by a level of choreographed public enthusiasm that struck many observers as usual, produced a daughter, Suri, and a marriage that lasted until 2012. Now, Holmes reportedly planned her exit from the marriage with considerable secrecy, aware of how the church handled departures. And she filed for divorce, retained custody of Suri, and moved quickly.
57:37 Speaker 02 I can't imagine, I feel like it's just like a whole scary situation happening with Tom Cruise. And Suri has been raised outside Scientology, and Tom Cruise has reportedly not seen her in years. A consequence, former members say, of the same disconnection policy applied to everyone else. And he has never publicly addressed it. So just a whole lot of shady shit going on behind the scenes of Cruz's life. And then, there's John Travolta. Again, another blow. Like, who doesn't love Grease? God damn it. But John has been a member since the 1970s, and his relationship with the church has outlasted everything. The
58:18 Speaker 02 collapse of his film career, its improbable revival, the death of his son Jett in 2009, and Decades of tabloid speculation about his personal life. And he has credited auditing with transforming his early career. And former members and journalists have long alleged that the church's leverage over Travolta runs into the other direction, too. And that auditing records containing sensitive personal disclosures have functioned as a reason to stay, AKA blackmail. And the church, obviously, denies this. And Travolta has never publicly indicated any desire to leave. And then there's Kristi Alley, who was a vocal and enthusiastic member for decades,
59:00 Speaker 02 crediting Scientology's Narcanon program with helping her overcome a cocaine addiction in the 1980s. And she remained a committed member until her death from cancer in 2022, and defended the church publicly and energetically throughout her life. And then there was Elizabeth Moss, best known for playing the lead in The Handmaid's Tale, a show about theocratic authoritarian society that controls women through religious doctrine, and is a practicing Scientologist and has declined to discuss the apparent tension in that pairing. I have lost all respect for this person because of now knowing this. This is insane. That is insane to be on that show and then be a part of Scientology as well.
59:45 Speaker 02 What the fuck? But she has described Scientology as something deeply personal that she doesn't speak about publicly because it would ruin her career, basically. But here I am, now you know. She's a staunch member of it. And then there is Beck, the musician, who grew up in a Scientology family and has been a member his entire life. And he has largely avoided discussing it in interviews as well. And then there's Erica Christensen, and Bodie Elfman, and Giovanni Rubisi, and his sister Marissa Rubisi are among dozens of working actors who are Scientologists, many of them second-generation members who grew up inside the church, which, you know, if you're growing up inside that church, that's like a whole other thing.
1:00:30 Speaker 02 If you're choosing to go in as an adult, that's one thing, and I'm judging you very harshly, but if you grow up- Inside it, I don't know, I do have a, I do have a little smidgen of empathy. Because that's just all you know, growing up. And then there's Isaac Hayes, the musician behind the South Park theme, satirizing Scientology. And he had been a cast member for nine years. And his son later stated that Hayes had suffered a stroke before the departure and had not personally made the decision to leave. And that church representatives had acted on his behalf. Because what celebrity members provide for the church is something it could never purchase directly. And that is mainstream legitimacy.
1:01:09 Speaker 02 A famous, successful person calling the technology real is proof to existing members that it works. And they bring their networks with them. Come, come, come, come, my child. I'm a celebrity. Everything I do is real and it matters. And it's supposed to give you FOMO. But I love that we're, we're just in like this grand awakening now where we just don't buy that shit. And it's fabulous. But what happens when a celebrity leaves is equally instructive. And when Leah Remini left in 2013, after 30 years, the church's response was immediate. And she was declared a suppressive person. And her character was publicly attacked and a coordinated campaign followed her for years.
1:01:55 Speaker 02 And former members who had been her close friends stopped speaking to her overnight. And she had been one of the church's most prominent public faces. And within days of her departure, she was treated like an enemy. And the same machine that makes celebrities useful on the way in, makes them targets on the way out. And the more prominent you were, the more aggressively they come after you. So once fair game starts, except they renamed it, which means nothing. Silence isn't really an option anyway. So that's the one thing I can think of, you know, with celebrities that join it and are part of it. And, you know, I'll give them, you know, a little devil's advocate benefit of the doubt.
1:02:35 Speaker 02 I can't imagine the fear in them, like if they want to leave, they can't. Because there's first, first off, there's like the, the auditing. Where they have all sorts of blackmail, which I don't know, maybe that means they are bad, bad people, depending on what they said to them. Um, and then there's just the fear of losing their entire career and all this stuff. It's a, it's a well-oiled machine that Scientology is built. It's very scary. Um, but who's to say? But obviously, it's not just celebrities walking through the door. It's, it's any person, really. And the people who walk through a Scientology door are not a particular type necessarily. And research on high commitment groups find members drawn most often from people at turning points.
1:03:19 Speaker 02 A divorce, a job that fell apart, a stretch of time where nothing quite fits. Basically, just lost people. We see this again and again with every cult that we go over. Cults just look for people who don't fit right now or that are looking for purpose in their life. Right? And the church is really good at spotting those openings. And it usually starts with a free personality test outside a church storefront. The Oxford Capacity Analysis is what it's called. And it has nothing to do with the Oxford University and no clinical validity whatsoever. And what it has is a very effective way of identifying whatever is currently wrong in your life and making it the conversation.
1:04:01 Speaker 02 And the results are never mailed and they're delivered in person by someone warm in a room that already feels like a community. And the first few weeks feel genuinely good. People ask about your life and actually listen. And everyone around you seems purposeful, like they found something. And that warmth isn't fake. Most of these people genuinely believe what they're in. The entry costs are low at first, so as not to scare you too much, not to sticker shock ya. And it's not out of generosity, but because the real financial demands come later. Once you've settled in, once you've gotten comfortable and once you feel like you can't leave. And in the meantime, the outside world gets quietly reframed.
1:04:46 Speaker 02 That worried friend becomes a potential trouble source. The family member asking questions gets assigned a category. And before long, the people most likely to pull you back are the ones who've been reclassified as the problem. And once you believe that, the next invoice stops feeling like a financial decision and more like just your own decision. You want to keep moving up, so you gotta pay. And that requires the bridge. Moving up and paying up. And that bridge to total freedom is very expensive. Entry-level courses run a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, which is still pretty expensive. And as members advance, costs rise dramatically.
1:05:30 Speaker 02 And some OT levels run to tens of thousands of dollars each. Reaching OT3 alone is estimated to cost between $100,000 and $300,000 in total accumulated payments. And at each level, members aren't merely completing a course, because at the lower levels, they believe they're erasing the root cause of all their suffering. And at the middle levels, they're accessing capabilities most humans will never develop, right? They're becoming superhuman, if you will. And at the upper OT levels, they believe they're doing work that affects the entire planet. So they get to play God up in this tier. You get to be God-tier, literally. And any hesitation about paying is handled
1:06:13 Speaker 02 through the same system that handles everything else. The reluctance to pay is framed as a spiritual problem, not a financial one. Because the reactive mind is interfering with your progress, and auditing can help you work through it. And members have taken second mortgages, emptied retirement accounts, and borrowed from family. And church staff has helped members identify money they didn't even know was accessible. And members who fall behind financially don't get removed. They just simply stop progressing. And in a social structure where everyone around you is constantly moving forward, stagnation carries real stigma. And a fully-committed member's life becomes organized almost entirely around the church.
1:06:58 Speaker 02 And evenings, weekends, and social time fold inward. And the outside world gets filtered through the church's framework, not really by force, but because nothing outside offers anything as affirming, as complete, or as purposeful as what's inside. Now, operating that in Level 3 is what you receive. After years of work and somewhere between a hundred and three hundred thousand dollars in payments like we spoke about before and Hubbard called the materials the wall of fire and he warned that reading them without proper preparation could cause pneumonia or even death. Okay, which is a very convenient thing to say because it means that any negative
1:07:42 Speaker 02 reaction you have to what you're about to learn confusion skepticism uncontrollable laughter is your own spiritual inadequacy. It's not really a reason to question the material. So let's just see what three hundred thousand dollars gets you and it'll tell you 75 million years ago a galactic ruler named Xenu controlled a confederacy of 76 planets each averaging 178 billion people and he had an overpopulation problem you see and his solution was to summon the access population into tax offices under false pretenses freeze them in glycol and alcohol load them onto a spacecraft shaped like the Douglas DC eight jets fly them to earth and drop them into volcanoes
1:08:26 Speaker 02 then he detonated hydrogen bombs and the major world religions were Xenu implants all of them the disembodied souls now called body fetons subjected to 36 days of electronic brainwashing attached themselves to whatever living beings remained and these humans are still there right now on you possibly several hundred of them and they are responsible for your fears your limitations your bad knee your bad relationship with your mommy just basically everything holding you back and the OT levels above three exist to remove them one by one but at additional cost and here's
1:09:08 Speaker 02 what almost nobody does after receiving this information leave they don't leave after hearing this story this fiction this L Ron Hubbard
1:09:22 Speaker 02 You know, grade A pathological lying fiction bullshit, which is crazy. Because the sunk cost is too high. They're in 300 grand and they know if they leave, they're just gonna, their careers are gonna get ruined, their life's gonna get ruined by these assholes. And the years they've spent are just too many. And crucially, Hubbard already told you that finding this absurd was a symptom of your own spiritual illness. So if you found this crazy, like me, it's because I'm spiritually ill and stupid. And by the time you're sitting in that room holding those pages, the architecture has been doing its job for years.
1:10:07 Speaker 02 The cult has been doing its job. And your doubt has been pre-explained away. And members at lower levels who deny that Xenu is any part of Scientology aren't lying. They genuinely just haven't been told yet because they can't read. I get, I know, I didn't pay anything, you know? The entire structure was designed so you won't find out until you've spent too much to turn back, essentially, until you're in too deep. Basically, it's like gambling gone wrong. It's like you have a gambling addiction and you just can't stop. And then there's a disconnection policy, which required members to completely sever contact with anyone the church had declared a suppressive person.
1:10:52 Speaker 02 Parents, children, spouses, siblings, partners of decades. One letter or phone call and then silence forever. No texts, no emails, no calls, no visits. The person simply disappears from your life as though they've never existed. And parents spent years not knowing whether their adult children were even alive. And some waited over a decade for a word that never came. And the church describes disconnection as a voluntary personal choice. Former members describe it very differently, though, because maintaining contact with your mother would cost you your entire social world. Every friend you've made in years, your standing, your spiritual... ...will progress. The choice is not free.
1:11:35 Speaker 02 The function is precise and very deliberate. It eliminates every person outside the church who might reach a member and raise a doubt. And it replaces the family they came in with with the new family. One entirely inside the organization, entirely aligned with its worldview. So your old support network is now completely gone, and the new one depends on your continued participation. For those already deep inside the C organization specifically, the consequences of stepping out of line were even more immediate. Because they would be put into the RPF, the Rehabilitation Project Force, as we know. And the church describes the RPF as a voluntary rehabilitation program.
1:12:18 Speaker 02 But former members consistently describe having no choice in the matter and being treated like less than animals, essentially. And some never made it to exit at all. So across Scientology's history, the church has been connected to deaths and disappearances that remain unexplained. And the pattern that emerges is consistent. People in psychological crisis, whose care was removed from outside professionals and handled entirely inside the church. And first is Florence Barnett, Shelley Miscavige's mother, whom we've already spoke about. What the hell was that? She was called a suppressive person, and then she mysteriously died of three gunshot wounds
1:13:03 Speaker 02 that were clearly made by someone else. And then there's Shelley Miscavige, who just disappeared and hasn't been seen since 2007. And then there was Lisa McPherson, who was born on February 10th in 1959 in Dallas, Texas. And she was not swept in accidentally or under duress. She had been a committed Scientologist since her teenage years in the 1970s, believing fully in what she was doing. And by the early 1990s, she had relocated to Clearwater, Florida, home to the Flagland Base, Scientology's spiritual headquarters and self-described "mecca of techni- ...perfection. And moving there was an act of devotion, essentially.
1:13:46 Speaker 02 And Lisa had made the choice deliberately with her whole heart. Now, on November 18th, 1995, she was rear-ended in a minor traffic accident on US Route 19. And she was not seriously physically injured. And she got out of her car, and then she began removing her clothing in the middle of the street. And paramedics transported her by ambulance to the Morton Plant Hospital. And she was alive. She was physically uninjured, and clearly and unmistakably in the middle of a psychological crisis. And a group of Scientologists arrived at the hospital shortly afterward, and they informed the staff that Lisa was fine, and that she was a Scientologist, and that the church would take care of her.
1:14:29 Speaker 02 And she was discharged against medical advice. And Morton Plant Hospital's own records show that the staff was concerned about her before she left. But she was taken to the Fort Harrison Hotel, the church's main facility in Clearwater, and placed under the "introspection rundown," a protocol written by Hubbard in 1973 for handling what the church calls a "psychotic break." And the protocol called for total isolation from all external contact. No communication with family or friends outside of the church, and no direct interaction with the people in crisis either. Essentially, just complete isolation and silence. Sounds like the opposite of what a person going through a psychological break would need, in my opinion.
1:15:14 Speaker 02 I'm not a doctor, though. What do I know? Now, the theory was that removing all stimulation would allow the person to naturally stabilize. So for 17 days, she was left in isolation. So Lisa McPherson was kept in a hotel room in complete isolation for 17 straight days. And the church staff kept detailed handwritten logs throughout. And those logs were later obtained and entered into evidence. And they described a woman slowly deteriorating day by day in the church's own hand. Weight loss, dehydration, diminishing consciousness. A woman who had walked into that room on- under her own power, who had years of her life invested in this organization,
1:15:57 Speaker 02 who had moved across the country to be closer to it, was losing ground quietly in a hotel room. And the logs note at multiple points that she was not eating and not drinking and not responding normally. And at no point during those 17 days were outside medical professionals called. And on December 5th, 1995, church staff placed Lisa McPherson into a van and drove 45 miles to a Scientologist's physician in Doondin, Florida. And she would die before they arrived. And she was only 36 years old. And her autopsy found severe dehydration and more than 40 insect bites on her body. And she had lost a significant amount of weight. And the Clearwater Police Department launched a homicide investigation.
1:16:42 Speaker 02 And the state attorney filed criminal charges against the Church of Scientology in 1998. And one count of abuse and neglect of a disabled adult. And one count of practicing medicine without a license. And in 2000, the criminal charges were dropped. And the medical examiner amended the death certificate. And the reasons for the amendment were never fully explained to the public satisfaction. And a civil wrongful death lawsuit brought by her family was settled out of court in 2004 for an undisclosed amount, under sealed terms. So, you can safely assume that money just washed away the fact that this woman died under the church's watch.
1:17:20 Speaker 02 And because of the church, the church murdered Lisa McPherson, in my opinion, allegedly. So no member of the Church of Scientology has ever been held criminally responsible for what happened to Lisa McPherson. And what Lisa's case represents is a pattern made very visible. A person in crisis, removed from outside care, isolated inside the church. And handwritten log documenting her deterioration, line by line, in the church's own hand. And medical intervention arriving too late by 45 miles. And the logs exist, and they were written by church members in church facilities during the 17 days they chose not to call a doctor. And no one has ever been held accountable. Fucking disgusting.
1:18:05 Speaker 02 And what's even more sickening is that children were not exempt from the demands of Scientology's internal structure. And in the C-Organization especially. Because they occupied a category all on their own. Because they weren't full members in the formal sense and not civilians either. They were just kind of present and expected to contribute. And the Cadet Organization was the formal structure for children of C-Org members. And kids as young as five years old and six were enrolled, given assignments, and expected to produce. And while their parents worked 16-hour days, the children were managed separately, largely apart from them. And the organization kind of just became the parent.
1:18:47 Speaker 02 And the children born into the C-Org signed billion-year contracts. Oh my god. The same contracts binding adults across all future lifetimes. And no court has ever adjudicated whether a contract signed by a six-year-old is legally valid. Which, how the hell would that be valid? Dude, I didn't even know how to spell my name at six years old. I don't think. Let alone redline a fucking contract. But the Church has never had to answer for it anyway, like they haven't had to answer for anything else. And the education inside the C-Org was built around Hubbard's own study tech. His system applied to his materials supervised by his organization. And standard academic subjects were secondary to understanding Scientology's texts and procedures.
1:19:32 Speaker 02 And multiple adults who grew up inside the C-Org describe emerging with significant gaps in basic knowledge. Things their peers simply knew they had never even been taught. And Jenna Miscavige Hill, David Miscavige's niece, published a memoir in 2013 titled "Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape." And she describes a childhood structured almost entirely around the organization. Separated from her parents for most of every day, assigned work from a young age, and always aware that any behavior reflecting poorly on the Church could have consequences. Not just for her, but also for her Parents and multiple former Sea Org members have also described significant pressure
1:20:16 Speaker 02 on pregnant women to either have abortions or leave the organization. And the stated position was that raising a child was incompatible with the Sea Org service. And the choice was framed as binary, like leave and have your child or end the pregnancy and stay. Just so messed up. And what adults who grew up inside Scientology most often describe is a fundamentally abnormal childhood with the work schedules, the ideological saturation, the absence of outside education, and the separation from their parents. And then the disorientation of leaving it. Because many described learning basic adult life skills essentially from scratch when they left.
1:20:58 Speaker 02 Like how to get a job, how to navigate bureaucracy, and how to just talk to people who have never heard of fetons. You know, you're basically an alien, which I guess, you know, in Scientology you kind of are. You're an alien like coming to Earth and just figuring out how humans actually work. Like that's what Scientology does to you. So a lot of them were just figuring this out in their twenties and even thirties, which is just, I can't even imagine. And the biggest wave of high-level departures came in the 2000s and the 2010s as former senior executives began talking publicly for the first time. And Marty Rathbun had been the Church's Inspector General and one of Miscavige's closest people for over two decades. And he left in 2004 and became the central source for the Tampa Bay Times' landmark
1:21:43 Speaker 02 truth rundown investigation in 2009. And Mike Rinder spent roughly three decades as the Church's chief international spokesman. And he left in 2007 and became one of the most sustained public critics of Scientology's history, co-hosting Leah Rimini's documentary series Scientology and the Aftermath, a three-season A and E series that ran from 2016 to 2019 and featured dozens of former members on camera and even won an Emmy Award. And the departure process for Sea Org members who leave without permission includes what the Church calls a freeloader debt, a bill for every course and auditing ...session received during their years of service, calculated at full current public rates.
1:22:28 Speaker 02 And these bills routinely run to tens of thousands of dollars. So you spent years working for, remember, $10 a week? And on the way out, they would hand you a bill. Not unlike the Canadian government. When I left the country, they told me to give them all my money before I left. But yeah, just a little side note for any Canadians that ever want to leave the country, there's an exit tax. Really fun, really fun. You'll learn about it if you ever leave. Now Lawrence Wright spent years researching and writing Going Clear, published in 2013. And the church's response was more than 25 letters totaling hundreds of pages, challenging every factual claim in the manuscript before publication. And the Tampa Bay Times Truth Rundown series
1:23:12 Speaker 02 won the gold medal for public service from the Florida Society of News Editors in 2009. And during the series publication, the church bought advertising space on the Tampa Bay Times' own website. What the kind of money Scientology has is disgusting, as we're figuring out. And everyone saw what they were doing. And it didn't work. Shocker. People were like, oh, they're just controlling the media. Like, the government, everything runs full circle. And Hubbard laid out the legal strategy in his own words in 1955, saying, "The purpose of the lawsuit is to harass, not to win." Right? They just want to harass you till you can't take it anymore. And then you win by doing that.
1:23:56 Speaker 02 2,000 individual lawsuits against IRS employees is the largest expression of that approach, as we talked about. And individual suits against journalists and former members were designed to rack up legal costs and deliver fear to people who couldn't afford to fight an organization of Scientology's resources. And other countries have been less tolerant than the United States. And Germany classified Scientology as incompatible with democratic values and placed it under state surveillance for decades. That's a W for Germany right there, I'd say. And France convicted the church of organized fraud in 2009. And a conviction upheld an appeal. Sick, love that. And Belgium, Australia, and Russia have all conducted formal investigations or taken
1:24:41 Speaker 02 regulatory action at various points. And America remains the place where Scientology has functioned most successfully with the least institutional resistance. And now that we're learning everything we're learning with, you know, Jeffrey Epstein and the government and all the control and how everything is just manufactured, that does not surprise me in the least and just makes me think that the government's in on Scientology too. And it's just a big money scheme, essentially, as we know, but it's disgusting. It's so dumb. I like, why do these people exist? You know? But the thing that finally broke their control over information wasn't a government and wasn't a courtroom. Shocker. It was the internet.
1:25:26 Speaker 02 Now, the entire architecture of Scientology's power over its members depends on controlling what they know, right? Knowledge is power and you need to control that knowledge, but the internet, ooh, that provides a lot of people with a lot of knowledge, like really fast, and they can't control that. Oh, no. The secret knowledge structure only functions if the secrets stay secret. You cannot charge someone $100,000 to discover that Xenu exists if they can find out about it for free, oh, like you guys right now. Oh, no. I saved you guys 300 grand. You're welcome, okay? Because the internet made that impossible, or made it possible to know, but impossible for the church to keep that information secret.
1:26:11 Speaker 02 And the church didn't see it coming. And in 1994, pieces of the OT levels began appearing on Usenet news groups, and the church came after them with copyright claims and legal threats. And some providers took the material down, but it kept spreading anyway because that's the way the internet works, baby. And by 2008, WikiLeaks had published 612 pages of OT-level materials. And the Xenu story was sitting in Google search results. And church representatives were still publicly denying that Xenu was any part of Scientology, while simultaneously filing legal actions to get him removed from the internet. And in January of 2008, the church demanded YouTube remove a leaked internal video featuring Tom Cruise.
1:26:56 Speaker 02 I hope they don't come after me. Just kidding, they won't. They won't come at me. Just kidding, please don't. Please don't. The response came from a loosely organized online collective called Anonymous. And they read the takedown as censorship and declared war. And on February 10th, 2008, Anonymous held simultaneous protests outside church facilities in 93 cities worldwide. And an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 people showed up wearing Guy Fawkes masks. And it was devastating in a way the church had no tools to handle. And their entire playbook relied on identifying and targeting individuals, suing them, surveilling them, contacting their employers and families. And Anonymous had no spokesperson to threaten and no employer to call
1:27:41 Speaker 02 and no family to pressure. Every tool the church had was useless against a crowd with no face. So what changed permanently was the information environment. Anyone curious about Scientology could now find out about Xenu before they ever walked through a door. And the secret the bridge was built to protect was sitting on the first page of search results. Whoa. So the information war was over and they lost it. So the church has claimed at various points between 8 and 15 million members worldwide. And independent researchers and sociologists have landed on numbers considerably smaller.
1:28:24 Speaker 02 And a 2008 American religious identification survey found approximately 25,000 Americans who identified as Scientologists. So the gap is partly explained by the billion-year contract, I guess, since everyone who ever joined is technically committed for all future lifetimes. What a crock of shit. And the church can, with a straight face, count living and the dead as current members. And any organization with 70 years of records could run that math. And former members and journalists who've visited major church facilities in recent years report something more telling than statistics. And the buildings feel pretty empty. And even flagship locations in
1:29:06 Speaker 02 Los Angeles and Clearwater draw noticeably less traffic than they once did. At the same time, the church has been aggressively acquiring properties through a program called the Ideal Org Initiative. And local communities are encouraged to fundraise for years to purchase and renovate large buildings, which are then inaugurated in elaborate ceremonies. And former members have described the program as "a fundraising mechanism that benefits central church accounts rather than local communities." And the resulting buildings, many of them grand and prominently located, often sit largely unused. So just a giant waste of space, waste of money, just taking up the real estate like a bunch of assholes.
1:29:47 Speaker 02 And independent financial analysts estimate the church's total assets at somewhere between $1 and $2 billion, with real estate holdings accumulated over decades accounting for a significant portion of that. And an organization that may have 25,000 actual active members is sitting on the financial infrastructure of one that claimed $15 million. And that gap between the money and the membership is one of the most telling numbers in the whole story. But the people who left, Rathman, Reinder, Raminie Wright, didn't tell their stories and just move on. They kept going. And Reinder has spent nearly two decades giving depositions, speaking at hearings, and appearing on camera for anyone who would listen.
1:30:33 Speaker 02 And Raminie filed legal actions against the church as recently as 2023, setting years of ongoing "fair game retaliation." So they're basically stalking her and like making her life a living hell because she left. And the documentary series Scientology and the Aftermath drew millions of viewers who had no prior connection to this story and left them with one that they couldn't forget. And what the church has not done in response to any of it is address the substance. No public accounting of the RPF's conditions, no explanation of where Shelley Miscavige is, and no answers to the questions the 1993 IRS agreement raised and never resolved. And in May of 2023...
1:31:16 Speaker 02 actor Danny Masterson, best known for That 70s Show, was convicted of two counts of rape and sentenced to 30 years to life in California State Prison. And the conviction itself was significant. And what surrounded it was even more significant, because Masterson's victims had attempted to report the assaults to the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 2000s, years before any charges were filed. And what happened next has been described in sworn testimony and civil lawsuits. And church officials intervened, and witnesses were contacted, and victims were pressured to handle the matter through Scientology's internal ethics procedures, rather than through the law enforcement.
1:31:59 Speaker 02 And the women, all Scientologists at the time, found themselves in a system that treated reporting a crime against them as a betrayal of the organization. And the LAPD sat on the investigation for nearly two decades. Talk about corruption. And it is impossible to know with certainty how much of that delay was attributable to church pressure and how much to other factors. But what is knowable is this: The church's framework explicitly classified the women as "potential trouble sources" for going to outside authorities. And the tools of disconnection and social pressure that the church has always used internally
1:32:40 Speaker 02 were being deployed to suppress a criminal complaint against one of its celebrity members. And it worked, for 20 years, which is horrifying. And when the conviction finally came, the church moved quickly to distance itself, describing Masterson as having been removed from active participation in the church activities. And former members and critics noted that the church had publicly defended him as recently as 2017, when accusations first became public. And the Masterson case cracked open something the church had long managed to keep closed: A serious legislative conversation about whether an organization with documented patterns of obstruction, abuse, and coercion should continue to operate under the full protections of religious tax.
1:33:26 Speaker 02 Now, the federal lawsuits accumulating against the church represents something it has not faced before, and that is the legal framework. Now, multiple former Sea Org members, including some who spent decades inside, have filed civil lawsuits under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. And the legal argument is specific and very serious, and it is that working 80 to 100 hours a week for $10, being unable to leave the base freely, and facing the RPF, or a freeloader debt bill as consequence of departure, and being threatened with the destruction of every relationship you have left, meets the federal legal definition of forced labor.
1:34:10 Speaker 02 These are not marginal claims filed by people with thin records. They are claims backed by decades of testimony corroborating accounts from hundreds of former members across multiple decades, and a paper trail of internal church policies that describe exactly the conditions being alleged. And federal judges have allowed them to proceed. And what makes this legally different from everything that came before is the framework, essentially. This fair game harassed critics into silence, and 2,000 IRS lawsuits exhausted a government agency, but human trafficking statutes were specifically designed to address situations where the normal mechanisms of consent and exit have been systemically dismantled.
1:34:53 Speaker 02 So they exist precisely because some organizations build structures so controlling that voluntary stops meaning anything. And the church is being asked, for the first time in a federal courtroom, to defend the conditions of Sea Org life, not as a matter of religious freedom, but as a matter of whether those conditions constitute a crime. And David Miscavige is named as a defendant in several of those suits, but he has not appeared. And the 1993 IRS agreement was, for 30 years, was the church's most unassailable legal protection. And it wasn't just tax exemption, it was a kind of institutional legitimacy, a signal
1:35:36 Speaker 02 that the US government had evaluated Scientology's religious claims and accepted them. And that protection is now under more serious scrutiny, finally, than at any point since it was granted. So the Danny Masterson case, the human trafficking lawsuits, and the ongoing fair game campaigns documented in active litigation, and the growing body of federal court records describing conditions inside the Sea Org have combined to create something completely new, which is a bipartisan political constituency interested in revisiting the question. And former members and advocacy groups have formally lobbied members of Congress, and tax law scholars who previously had no particular interest in Scientology have begun writing
1:36:19 Speaker 02 about the legal standards in the 1993 agreement was held to, and whether those standards would survive the evidence that has emerged since. My guess is fucking no. And there is no immediate legislative threat. And the Church has substantial legal resources and a long history of making government scrutiny more trouble than it's worth, not to mention the fucking billion dollars they have in their back pocket. But the argument the Church relied on in 1993, that it is a sincere religious organization deserving the full protections afforded to faith communities, is harder to sustain in a courtroom where former members are testifying about forced labor, obstruction of justice, and systemic suppression of criminal complaints. You know what I mean?
1:37:04 Speaker 02 And the agreement was negotiated before WikiLeaks published the OT levels, and before the truth rundown, and before going clear, and before the Masterson verdict, and before a federal judge publicly expressed frustration that the organization's leader was evading service of process. So the IRS gave Scientology its shield in a private meeting whose contents have never been disclosed. And whether that shield survives what is now on the public record is a question no one has yet been forced to answer. And David Miscavige stopped making press appearances around 2022. And that timing is obviously not coincidental, because that is when federal lawsuits began naming
1:37:46 Speaker 02 Him as a defendant. So he did like his daddy did and he disappeared. Once process servers started looking for him, he became a very difficult person to find outside the church. And he has not disappeared entirely. And in March in 2024, he appeared at the dedication of the Ideal Church of Scientology in Chicago, speaking onstage before thousands of people. And in December of 2024, he delivered a two-and-a-half-hour address at the Schrein Auditorium in Los Angeles for the church's annual New Year's celebration. But what he will not do is appear anywhere he does not control, right? No press interviews, no public events outside church property, and no legal proceedings. And a California Superior Court judge said this to his legal team in 2024, saying,
1:38:31 Speaker 02 quote, "He's got teams of lawyers. He should just appear and defend himself. It's very frustrating for me. We've reached a new level of craziness," unquote. But he still hasn't appeared because he's a giant, fucking, baby, wuss, narcissistic, psychopathic asshole. But the church's finances have never been fully disclosed. And the 1993 IRS agreement covering over 150 entities has never been released to the public. And Shelley Miscavige has not been seen outside the church control since 2007. And across more than 70 years, the church was built by a man who invented his own biography, borrowed ideas that already had foundations, and dressed them as revelation,
1:39:16 Speaker 02 and ran an organization that caused documented, identifiable harm, financial ruin, psychological abuse, the destruction of families, and the suppression of anyone who tried to say so out loud. And it has survived everything thrown at it, including raids, lawsuits, defections, the internet. And it's all because of its money, its lawyers, and the people inside who genuinely believe. But what it no longer has is control over what you know before you walk through its doors. The story is not over. I hope it's not over. But for the first time in its history, it is being told by people the church Cannot silence. Where is Shelley Miscavige?
1:40:00 Speaker 02 What did the 1993 agreement actually contain? Who has been paid and how much to keep the courts closed? The questions remain open. But that is that for the deep dive on Scientology. Please let me know what else you want me to deep dive down below. This one was crazy. I mean, I knew a little bit about it, but my God. It's crazy. It's crazy that these organizations can get their claws into our government. That is extremely disturbing, especially given our government is extremely flawed. But I digress. Let me know what else you guys want me to deep dive into. And until then, I will see you beautiful face and stay safe out there. All right. Bye.
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