RedHanded - FROM THE VAULT - Scientology: Parts 1&2

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

With Scientology’s biggest poster boy back on the big screen, the church is ramping up the recruitment drive. And to make sure you STAY AWAY from this sinister, star-studded sci-fi cult posing as a world religion, we’re rereleasing our two-parter as a bumper bonus episode...-- Hannah and Suruthi peer under the slippery stone of Scientology’s sinister origins. They track the life of founder L. Ron Hubbard, from the birth of Dianetics, to the constantly shifting goalposts of engrams, and of course the conception of the Sea Org.Then, they unravel the mysteries of Scientology (and get themselves fair-gamed) by discussing Scientology's most important questions like: "what is the current structure of The Church of Scientology?", "where does Tom Cruise fit in?" and most importantly "where on Xenu's green earth is dead-eyed Dave's wife Shelly Miscavige?"--Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Always keep your dog on a leash in public. Learn more at toronto.ca slash leash your dog. A message from the city of Toronto. Inspired by the hit podcast Against the Odds comes the gripping guidebook, How to Survive Against the Odds. Learn how to handle whatever nature throws at you through gut-wrenching true stories of life or death situations. This might just

be the most important book you'll ever read. Go to SurvivalGuidebook.com to get your copy of How to Survive Against the Odds today or visit your favorite bookstore. Hello Earthling, this is Zinu speaking. It's been brought to my attention that Mission Impossible 3 is in cinemas across the globe and I've instructed my army of Scientology underlings to recruit as many of you as humanly possible but Avengers of the Universe Red-Handed are standing in my way by re-releasing their series on Scientology from years ago to remind all of you Gen Zers that it's actually really bad and if you get a leaflet through your door like my sister did last week

do not under any circumstances go for a personality test that is how they get you and you will be in debt for the rest of your life. Listen to Leah Remini and me and Cerise this is what Scientology is actually about not being happy and fulfilled. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to the second episode of Red-Handed for 2022. It was supposed to be the first, but life happens sometimes. It does happen and by life happens sometimes we mean that Saruti accidentally gets incredibly drunk and then falls over in her childhood bedroom and ends up with an ankle the size of a grapefruit and is still limping around. Yes, no, it was not the ideal way to start 2022. It's not what I had planned. I had planned to come into this year being far more impressive and I have degraded myself almost immediately.

But you could look at it another way. Oh, tell me. You have already overcome. There you go. See, that's why she keeps me around. I've already hit the trough. Yeah, it's only up from here. That's what I keep telling myself. But I hope not because I'm surely struggling to walk uphill right now. The ankle is bandaged. It is not ideal. Thank you to everybody on Patreon who sent me recommendations on how to deal with a sprained ankle. It is not ideal. Thank you to everybody on Patreon who sent me recommendations on how to deal with a sprained ankle. It is nothing more injurious than that. It's absolutely fine everybody. Just feeling a little bit bruised, ego-wise and ankle-wise, but all is well. And we're back.

We are so back, back, back, back again with something, you know what, part one of our Scientology series, I feel fine about. I feel like we're not going to get fair gamed, no one's going to sue us. Part two, we may run into some issues. I can't run very fast right now. I'll carry you on my back. That's the rule, isn't it? You've just got to pair up with someone who isn't as fast as you seem. Oh yeah, so they'll just get you.

So I'm the limp gazelle right now, ready for a chomping from Scientology. The reason I say that is that, of course, lots of podcasts have covered Scientology. What they tend to do is stay on the L. Ron Hubbard side of things and then they stop. We won't be doing that. We are not going to stop. That is the epitaph that will be on my gravestone. She would not stop. Exactly. So without further ado, Happy New Year, one more ado, let's get on with it. I'm not quite sure why I chose to write the opening like this, but I did. Lots of things seemed like a better idea on that side of 2021.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What organization has over a billion dollars in liquid assets, partial or total tax exemption in 25 countries, but cult status in many others? What so-called church claims to have millions of members worldwide, but realistically only has about 25,000 on its home turf of the United States. And of course, which leader's wife has not been seen in public for 15 years? Correct, sausages, you can all read and you also listen to the opening of the episode. It is Scientology. And as I alluded to, this is going to be a two-parter. This is part one in which we'll

be dragging you through the history of Scientology and the shady dealings that got them to where they stand today surveying Los Angeles from the towers of their celebrity center. And then next week, we will go boldly where no true crime podcast has gone before and take you to the darker side of Scientology and its terrifying current helmsman, David Miscavige. Helmsman is a scary word. It is a scary word and also he's a scary man. Double whammy. Dead-eyed Miss Cavage as I have taken to.

I've watched so much Scientology content and he is the most dead behind the eyes person I have ever witnessed. Have you listened to the Joe Rogan podcast where he interviews his dad? His dad. Oh yeah. Yeah. We'll leave a link to it in this episode if you haven't. Would highly recommend. And we're also going to find out how Scientology commands the celebrities that sing its praises, hound those who leave and speak out against them, and most sinisterly of all, we are going to try

and answer the question that Leah Remini has been asking for years. Where is Shirley Miscavige? And we're going to try to do it all without getting fair gamed. I will say though, if we get a letter from the Church of Scientology, I'm framing that shit. That will be a career highlight for me. Yes, I think that is fair. That is a fair reaction. I'll call the framers. It's hard to buy bespoke frames. Why are they so expensive? Why are frames so expensive? Why are frames so expensive? I think about this often. I think about it all the time. Why is this frame four little bits of wood? Should we

just start framing this? Oh, stop it. Oh my God. Honestly, guys, I cannot tell you how many times a day. She's like, should we just do this? Like, yes, with all of our spare time. You can't stop. I won't stop, remember? She will not stop. So back to Scientology. We have decades of ground to cover with Scientology before we can get anywhere near answering the question,

where is Shelley Miscavige? Or even before we can get to the church and its tyranny of today. And it would make absolutely no sense to start anywhere else other than with the life and times of the man, the myth, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. That is a great name. I'm not going to lie. Yeah.

It's not like a forgettable name. No, you're going to remember someone called Lafayette for sure. I would. And I say myth not to bolster any kind of legendary status around Hubbard. The church do just fine on their own with that. We are using the M word because when someone is as prolific a liar as L. Ron Hubbard was, it is quite difficult to separate fact from science fiction. Scientologists have one story, those against the church have another. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

So here is what we do know. Hubbard was born in Nebraska in 1911. Do you know what the state motto of Nebraska is? No, but is it better than Kentucky's? Unbridled spirit is my favorite one. Unbridled spirit. It kind of makes me a bit like, oh, I'm not even from Kentucky. I know. And also New Hampshire is live free or die. You can't get much more intense than that. But Nebraska is equality before the law. Yeah, not bad. Not bad for Nebraska. I don't know anything else about Nebraska.

No, I couldn't even point to it on a map. Not a fucking clue. So he was born in the equality before the law state in 1911. unsurprisingly he was an only child. His family moved to Montana where his dad ran a theatre. A young Hubbard loved the vaudeville axe that would swing through town. He also, like many only child losers, loved to read. Anyway, let's just keep going. But he wasn't reading the Lone Ranger or whatever the fuck kids were reading back in the 1910s slash 20s. No, no, no. Little L. Ron Hubbard was reading Freud and Young and he also developed a love for magicians. If your child is reading Sigmund Freud. Well, I think it depends on the type of parent you are because there are some parents who

be like, my child's a genius. And some of them would be like, maybe stop reading about sex so much, you little child. Or maybe his parents just weren't paying attention. Because if I had to choose between vaudeville, which includes a lot of boobs, and reading Freud, I would choose the boobs. I've also read quite a lot of Freud at university, and it's tough going. I think if my child started reading Freud,

I would just be like, oh my God, my child's a genius. I knew you would. Everyone be quiet. Leave him alone. Let him read about sperm dreams. Oh, absolutely. So Elrond Hubbard's obsession with magic, according to him, led him to search for shamanic discovery.

See, that's where it's always going to end up. That's the problem. And of course, that's where it's always going to end up. That's the problem. And of course, that caused quite a lot of horror among his Methodist family and he actually ended up becoming blood brothers with a medicine man from a Native American tribe. Not totally casual, I'm going to say. Wait till you hear what the medicine man was called. Well, we can get to that immediately because the medicine man was called Old Tom Madfeathers and he could jump 15 feet in the air, apparently. And that my friends is our first visitation to Elrond Hubbard makes it up.

Like it just, it's bullshit, but this is what he does. He like, is it totally impossible that he would have met? They're called called Blackfoot, which is actually like, it's three tribes under one name. I don't know what all the names are and I'm also going to say them wrong, so I'm just going to not do it. But there are Blackfoot Native Americans in Nebraska. It's not impossible that he would have come into contact with them, do I think he was called Old Tom Madfeathers and could jump 15 feet in the air? Absolutely not. He just uses it in his own myth making.

And he's also like, would this Native American man who existed, why would he be bothered to become blood brothers with Elrond Hubbard? MS – Well, right, yeah, exactly. LH – There's also that. What is he like? But again, it's part of the myth-making that Elrond Hubbard does for himself, exactly like you said, like this man, this mystical Native American man could see something in me and he chose to become blood brothers with me. MS – Well, that's what it is. He's already paving the way to be the Messiah. Yeah.

Or perhaps paving the canal because Errol and Hubbard's dad was a Navy man and Hubbard was off the boat. He was an able seaman and in 1923, he took a 7,000 mile journey from Seattle to DC via the Panama Canal to visit his dad. And while I was researching this, I had another moment of, has Hannah completely misunderstood this? I can confirm the Panama Canal to visit his dad. And while I was researching this, I had another moment of, has Hannah completely misunderstood this? I can confirm the Panama Canal is in Panama. So what he did was went from one side of the United States all the way down across and then back up,

which is why it was 7,000 miles. I see. And why it was all aboard a ship. Got it. And now I understand that, but there was a good hour of panic where I was like, maybe the Panama Canal doesn't exist at all. It's good to double check the facts. Especially when if you get it wrong, you get savaged on the internet.

So he went to go and see his dad and then the young adventurer kept roaming further afield. These travels would set the foundations for a lifelong obsession with mysticism. In Hubbard's version of events, he pedaled around the Orient like a bereft orphan and watched monks meditate for weeks on end. He entered forbidden Buddhist territories that no white man had ever seen before and saw ceremonies that no Westerner would dare to dream of. In reality, he went on a trip with his parents that was organized by the YMCA and he was in China for a grand total of 10 days. Got it. During this pretty brief trip, he fostered the following opinions on the land of

the red dragon. This is a quote, the very nature of the China man holds him back. And another quote, the trouble with China is there are too many C words or great term for East Asian people. There are too many C words here. So he's not the most generous or kind or forthcoming or tolerant or I'm not even going to say off his time because it's not good enough. Well, you know, when is this? In the? Like the 30s. I mean, I'm not surprised by that. No, I mean me either. But I also think if he lived now, he would say the same thing. Oh, he would. But then I guess someone who was brought up in the 30s they're probably thinking

that anyway. So after this whirlwind tour of the Far East, Hubbard enrolled in the School of Engineering at George Washington University and it's a fine university currently ranked at number 63 in the USA. Yeah that's fine. That's good. But Hubbard was terrible. He was a very very bad student. He spent all of his time

that he should have been doing engineering new things. He actually spent that time running a school newspaper and a literary magazine in which he published his first work of fiction. Arguably, therefore, he just picked the wrong degree. I'm not sure that he would have been able to do a creative writing degree at that particular moment in time. I see. Journalism? Maybe, I don't know. Communications? Something else.

PR. PR? Literally anything else. International relations. What I mean is he's not slacking about while he's not doing engineering. He just doesn't want to be doing engineering. He just doesn't want to be doing that. He wants to be being a journalist or a writer. And soon, probably realizing that he didn't want to be doing engineering, he dropped out of university to flop around collecting weird shit and flying planes.

For all his faults, Hubbard was an adept pilot. And to illustrate this fact, he gave himself the nickname, and he gave himself the nickname, Flash. Yeah. Hi, I'm Flash. My friends call me Flash. No one calls you Flash, Ron. No, I don't think anyone should give themselves a nickname.

I think if you give it to yourself, it's not a nickname. It's you being a dickhead. Like I just, I don't think it's no, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. Don't give yourself a nickname. No. Do you have any nicknames? No, no, I can't. No, I don't have nicknames. And like the only nickname I have and it's not a nickname. It's just a shortening of my name. And even that, it's not in the same way that like Tom is to Thomas, where like your bank manager or your boss or somebody else could call you Tom immediately.

That's true. Yeah. I would find it very uncomfortable if somebody I didn't know just started calling me through. I don't know why. I feel like it's just- I would feel weird about that too. It feels overly familiar. I'm like, don't do that. That's weird. Not like when listeners do it because I think it's cute because they listen to the show and I feel like we have a connection. If a random person just started calling me Saru, I'd feel a bit weird about that. It's like in Korean when you're like

calling someone to like my friend Sejin, for example, it'd be like, I'll say Jin-ah, like come here. But if you're very close to that person, you're a family member, you just use the end of their names like Jin-ah. But you can only. But if you're very close to that person, you're a family member, you just use the end of their names, so like Jinnat. But you can only do that if you're like family close and it's really offensive to do it if you're not. I don't feel that level, but I do feel weird. I feel weird about it. But anyway, my nickname is certainly not Flash,

but Elrond Hubbard's was. Is it Saruti Blankface? Saruti Blankface. His Hannah Blankface. Also about Elrond Hubbard, the important thing to know, weird nickname or not, he wasn't completely adept at everything because he actually got married at 22 to a lady called Louise Grubb, but he called her Polly. There's a lot of like old and timey names.

And maybe the reason he decided he could be called Flash is because someone was like, I'm Louise, but call me Polly. I don't think Polly is a, it's not like Peggy is for Margaret. Do you know what I mean? Like it's not. No, it's definitely not for Louise. So maybe people could just be like, my name's Hannah, but you can call me Esmeralda. Like, you know, I think maybe they're a bit more free and easy with the names. Why not? Why not? Polly slash Louise got pregnant pretty soon after the wedding and so of course Hubbard needed some money, fast. His magazine writing wasn't exactly quite cutting the mustard so he turned his attention to pulp fiction where like literary giant Charles Dickens

he would be paid a penny for every word he wrote. Which maybe that was a good deal then. It's a good deal and it's also why Charles Dickens books are so fucking boring. And long. Honestly. One of my biggest like, one of my English teachers at school, his biggest like bugbear with me, he was like, handing your sentences is so long, like you need to break them up. And then we had to read fucking Oliver Twist and I was like, you having a laugh? The first sentence, like four paragraphs. I'm no fan of Dickens. No, I just, I mean, I hate to read, so I can't do it.

I mean, I was- It's torture, why would you do it? I would say it from the other end of someone who, I wouldn't say loves to read. I'm like, I like to read. I like to read books. I fucking hate Dickens. Chasing that sweet, sweet coin, Hubbard started to turn out hundreds of thousands of words per month.

His motto was, first draft, last draft, get it out the door. Just like at Redhead. Just like at Redhead. I'm kidding, we work very hard. We do work very hard. Many, many drafts. I always call the first draft the vomit draft. You do. And just get it out and then you can go over it and it's never as bad as you think. No, no, no.

So this prolific production line of prose would earn Hubbard a title that he still holds today. He wrote over a thousand works of fiction over the course of his life, which is more than any other human being ever. I don't know why I wrote that like there's a cow that's written in 1002. Which is more than any human has ever achieved. Maybe there's a gazelle somewhere that's done 2000, we don't know. Stranger things have happened. So Polygrub had a few kids, but Hubbard was not that bothered about them. He had his sights set on the bright lights of the City of Angels, and in 1937 he got

his break. A story he had written called The Secret of Treasure Island was optioned by Columbia Pictures. But after that, nothing really happened and he would soon be back in Washington with his wife and his stupid kids, a fate he blamed squarely on and this is a quote, dumb due producers. Excellent. He's very much an equal opportunities racist. He hates everyone, yeah. But a very convenient epiphany was just around the corner. On New Year's Day 1938, during a dental operation, L. Ron Hubbard's heart stopped

beating under anaesthetic. And instead of writing off this near-death experience as a gas-induced hallucination, Hubbard awoke believing that he had been gifted the answers to life, the universe and everything. He'd seen a great gate and had heard a voice telling him that it was not his time to die. It's just the dentist. Don't die. It's not your time to die. Please. I can't handle another fucking-

I've got children. ...fucking lawsuit of another person who dies in this chair. I'm sorry I overdid it on the Lord and I'm come back. It's a 30s joke and he's just giving like pumping heroin. Just heroin, yeah. Just straight heroin into his fucking jaw. What's the thing that the dentist does in Cider House Rules? Ether, where they like there's like a muslin over your nose and they just like drop though, it's probably that.

Excellent. You just come out with like burn marks all over your face. Great. Yeah, yeah, fully. But that's not what happened to Hubbard and he decided that a writer by trade, he was going to do the thing he decided that a writer by trade, he was going to do the thing he only knew how to do. And he wrote about his life-changing experience and all of the secrets that had been bestowed upon him by the mighty universal power. He wrote them all down in a book that he named Excalibur. So Excalibur is obviously the sword in the stone, King Arthur.

No one can pull it out apart from King Arthur because he's King Arthur. It's a very messianic story. But these swords are always drawn to Camelot, to Arthur, to I know it's not the same thing, but Richard the Lionheart, all of that kind of thing. It's just like, I don't know, it's a weird like little magnet that always draws these sort of people. Yes, and I think that like, like the story of King Arthur and Camelot is very like intertwined with Richard the Lionheart and Richard the Lionheart obviously led the Crusades in Palestine. So like it's all very intertwined with this like fight between good and evil and the like holy leader. Yeah, it's, they always end up there sooner or

later. But the thing about Excalibur, Elrond Hubbard's Excalibur, not King Arthur's Excalibur, is that it was never published and that led quite a few critics, myself included, to say that this book probably never existed at all, which would make sense because once you've published The Key to Existence, you're not much used to anyone anymore. Just ask Joseph Smith. All right, very quick break because I know you are gagging to get back to this particular episode, but we have to tell you a little bit about what's going on on Patreon this week. Certainly. Well, this week we have Under the Duvet where I explain how hypnosis works badly, but it works.

It does work. And I will tell you how I came off the pill and now the back knee's back. We also have a little chat about Russell Brand and contemplate the composition of the soul and whether it even fucking matters. And then I do a little review on a throwback dating TV show that I watched on Channel 4 called Perfect Match where I literally couldn't believe, A, that people were smoking in clubs because it's that old and then all the horrific things that were coming out of people's mouths. And you can listen to all of that over on Patreon and you can watch it too under the duvet is every week we release it every Wednesday morning and also on Patreon you can get Red Handed totally ad free and we also do monthly bonus episodes and you can

find all of that at patreon.com forward slash red handed. Inspired by the hit Wondery podcast Against the Odds comes the gripping guidebook How to Survive Against the Odds, Tales and Tips for Animal Attacks and Natural Disasters. This might just be the most important book you'll ever read. Go inside life or death situations where everyday people survived nature's most extreme scenarios. And learn how you can too. In these tales, you'll hear about the grit, willpower, and know-how needed to endure shipwrecks, alligator attacks, earthquakes and more.

You'll learn from experts, including top doctors, about what happens to your body and mind in life-threatening situations. Plus, important tips on what to do and equally important, what not to do when faced with a situation that is truly against the odds. Go to www.survivalguidebook.com to get your copy of How to Survive Against the Odds Today, or visit your favorite bookstore. Hubbard got around this small problem of the book not existing by proclaiming

that the first six people he had showed the manuscript to completely lost their minds, and one of them even jumped out a window. It's just too much. It's just too much. If you're not ready, you can't handle it. If you're not, ginger pants are on Hubbard, then you can't handle it because he has the answers.

He does. If anything, you know, if you can barely handle the secret, you cannot handle Excalibur. Oh, no, no, no. Come on. So he argued that it was actually a public service to not publish Excalibur. Maybe that's how we do it. I wrote such a great script on what am I working on, whatever I'm working on right now, but you just can't handle it. So here's just an hour of blank. And then the rest of your life, you'll be known as the best podcast who ever lived. Yeah, we'll do that. Fabulous. And similarly, in a vein of equal arrogance, Hubbard had high hopes for himself.

He wrote that he wanted to smash his name into history so violently that it would take a legendary form. That's never a good thing. Don't do that. It's kind of like, you know, at the beginning of Bronson, where he's like, I always wanted to be famous. That's what this is. Like, Elrond Hubbard does not care how he gets there at all. He just wants to get there with a lot of babes and a lot of money. Well, this is the thing. It's like that book I was telling you about that I'm reading at the moment. It's by a journalist called Will Storr and it's called The Status Game. And

it is basically in that. I don't think it's like a unique theory to Will maybe, but I haven't heard it explained in the way that he explains it in the book before. And he basically says that people achieve status in society by one of three ways, which is by competence, by virtue, or by dominance. And I think L. Ron Hubbard realised early on that he's probably not the most virtuous person and nor does he care to proclaim virtuosity, apart from his twisted version of of it as we'll see later on. And I think he realised he probably isn't competent. So he decides to go with dominance. And he dominates a game that he makes up. Yeah. I mean, that's the way to do it.

That is the way to play the game. Make up the game and tell no one else the rules and then just drip feed the rules. And then smash your name into history violently. Yep. bingo. So yeah, like we said, he is on the road to what he considers to be legendary status. But legend had to wait because Hubbard returned to pulp and to New York, where luckily for him, science fiction was having a bit of a moment and he got the bougie recognition that he had been yearning for for years. And what happens when a man desperately seeking this much attention and approval gets a little

bit of recognition? Well, they do what you probably expect and he ended up cheating on his wife, Polly slash Louise, quite a lot. Which was obviously her fault, in the gospel, according to Hubbard anyway. Because he wrote, quote, my failure to please Polly made me always pay so much attention to my momentary mate that I derived small pleasure myself. Cry me a fucking river. I'm so sorry for you. How awful. Also, I haven't really dived into this.

So actually what I should say, so the major source, and I think the absolute best book out there on science, one of these is called Going Clear. There's also a really great documentary of the same name based on it. So if you're going to read one book, go and read that one. It'd be long. It's like 15,000 pages. Bloody hell. I know. You bitch read it. I've done it. Read it. There's a lot in there about Hubbard's obsession with masturbation. I have not put that in because the book, as I said, is 15,000 pages long. But yes, he was obsessed with masturbating, with masturbating and then not masturbating and like the virtue of that,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He goes on to become impotent in his later life. But his fleeting pleasure didn't stop him from shying about and he ended up with the clap. As we will go on to discover, Hubbard didn't like doctors, so instead of getting some antibiotics to clear that thing right up, he self-medicated with sulphur, which is a component of some antibiotics. But it's not the whole deal and it's not sulphite either. But so worried was Hubbard about his wiener that he blasted himself with so much sulphur, even he was concerned that he had permanently inhibited the function of his brain. Then he fucked around in the Navy for a bit, a period of his life that was vastly overblown

in later years because he painted himself as some sort of war hero but, truth be told, he achieved very little at war. In 1944 he found himself in Princeton with a bunch of other science fiction writers, gaming scenarios for the American armed forces. None of his ideas were ever used however. During the invasion of Okinawa, Hubbard's earthly body betrayed him once again and he was flawed by hip, back and optic nerve injuries, which he claimed he healed completely himself using principles that would become the basis of what he would call Dianetics. Which of course, if you know anything about anything to do with this world, you will know would in turn become Scientology.

Once he had miraculously healed himself with the secrets he refused to share for fear of sending the listener round the bend, Hubbard fell in with the James Dean of the occult prime suspect for a Patreon bonus, I think, John Whiteside Parsons, who happens to have a crater on the moon named after him because he quite literally invented solid rocket fuel. That's quite a claim. And he loved rockets, he loved fuel, and he also loved sex magic. And he especially loved to do it at his millionaire's row home in Pasadena that he called the Parsonage which is very clever. John Parsons had the Parsonage sectioned off into multiple apartments which he leased to

atheists and atheists only which in the 40s was pretty revolutionary. This no-god rule attracted astronomers, opera singers, criminals, felons, atomic bomb engineers, and eventually Elrond Hubbard. The parties, coffins, drugs, naked ladies, cauldrons, and ubiquitous wanking probably helped too. The personage claimed to be a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a not-so-secret society dedicated to magic and witchcraft as pondered by Aleister Crowley. Hubbard always strenuously denied that Scientology or Dianetics were based on the Book of the Law, but one of Hubbard's sons, Ronald, who now goes by the name Ronald de Wolfe, says

this is utter bullshit. It's also worth noting that the modern Church of Scientology claim that Hubbard was only part of the Ordo Templis Orientis, because he was spying on the occultists at the request of the CIA. That old chestnut. But according to Ronald DeWolf, all Scientology actually is, is black magic stretched out over a long period of time. And that's the inner core of Scientology and the only bit that actually works. Yeah, it is quite reminiscent of when we did the Satanist, Satanism episode. It's so similar. It's, you know, the not being a victim, the taking charge of your own business. All positive, positive messages.

Yes, but also fundamentally the thing with Scientology. They want your money. That is that, yes, they want your money. And secondly, is that it's not your fault. I think the difference between like sort of modern church of Satan, Satanism is like you are in control of everything. So that means when something bad happens, that's on you, bro. Which is a better message that it's not your fault. But Scientology is like, it's not your fault. It's aliens. Oh, see, I can't get on board with that.

No, and we're not there yet either. So hold on to your pants. Hubbard never actually met Crowley, who of course died in 1947, but Hubbard wasted absolutely no time in taking his place. He acted as Parson's scribe in a ritual they called Babylon Working, which sounds like the latest co-sharing space in London. Babylon Working, the Hanging hanging gardens of shared offices. So the aim of which, speaking about this ritual, was to give birth to the Antichrist, or a far more fun nickname, Moonchild.

Yeah, Moonchild's not that bad. Antichrist. Yep. But you know, slight rebrand. Parsons and Crowley had all the will in the world, but they hadn't a womb between them. So they needed a lady. But she couldn't just be any old lady. They needed the Scarlet Woman, as prophesied by Crowley himself. The summoning of this Scarlet Woman involved Parsons wanking into a piece of paper quite

a lot as Hubbard watched. That's literally all it is. Some charting, some wanking onto some paper and they do it over and over and over again. Imagine if that's all you had to do to find yourself an appropriate match. We're back on troweling through Hinge. Imagine if all you had to do was just wank onto a piece of paper. If only. I'm just swiping into the abyss, feeling empty.

Who knows how many wanks later Marjorie Cameron showed up to the parsonage accompanied by a bolt of lightning, saying that she had been in a car accident and didn't know who she was or where she was going. The perfect woman. The perfect, perfect woman. No memory of who she ever was before she met you and you can just mould her into exactly what you need her to be. And that wasn't the only thing that made Marjorie Cameron perfect because she also just so happened to look like the legend. She had red hair and slanted green

eyes with strong masculine features. That's Parson's story anyway. Marjorie's story is that she knew exactly who she was and that she went to the Parsonage because she wanted to see naked women jump over fires. Sure. Fair enough. You do you Margaery. But as soon after she joined, we do know that this is kind of both of their stories, that Parson started banging Margaery, mainly on an altar, trying to make a demon baby. So she definitely is the Scarlet woman in his telling of things and they definitely do have a lot of ritual sex. I don't know if the moon child was ever produced,

but Margaery didn't just show up out of nowhere, dropped in by Satan himself. She was fully aware of what was going on. And while Parsons was busy banging Margaery trying to summon up the Antichrist, Hubbard, rather sneakily, stole his girlfriend Sarah Northrup. And this might seem a little bit harsh, a little bit devious, a little bit sneaky, but when you consider that Parsons was actually first married to Sarah's sister, kind of seems a bit karmic. Yeah, I think there's a lot of swapping going on anyway. I mean, there's a vibe at the Parsonage. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of group sex going on, but I would argue John Parsons is, you know, a medium attractive man. Aaron Hobbard is not, but I think he has that sort of like

magnetism thing. Does he have the magic with a Cyanaceae? Yes, he's got that sex magic and he manages to- Put it all over you. Oh, good. Yeah, he- Put it all over you. Oh, good. Yeah. He dribbles it all over your face. He manages it again and again and again.

But I predict that that is A, to do with having the confidence of a white man. And B, if you spout enough nonsense in a place where people are specifically looking for nonsense, then you know. I think it's just confidence. It's just confidence and charisma. It's like, I've been listening to a lot of history podcasts over the holidays, which I'll talk about on Under the Duvet. But come on. Cleopatra, famously not a white man, incredibly confident, incredibly charismatic.

Julia Caesar and Mark Antony, fucking mad for him. Anne Boleyn, not super hot babe, apparently, but we want to believe she was. She wasn't. She was just super educated, super sophisticated, super charismatic. If you listen to our Gunpowder Plot episode over on Patreon, change the course of British history, English history. Absolutely transformed it. I think if you're single, just work on your charm and your charisma and your something else. You too too can be magic with a CK. And apparently also Helen of Troy, the ship that launched a thousand faces. Do you want to try that again?

The face that launched a thousand ships. Actually, I watched a very interesting documentary with Bettany Hughes, one of my favourite historians. Apparently, contemporaries, she's not a looker. Interesting. Apparently, she was just incredibly charismatic. There you go. There you go. The one thing you can't buy.

Just be confident and charismatic and then all your problems will be solved. So anyway, Parsons didn't seem too fazed by the loss of his girlfriend Sarah to Hubbard. In fact, he decided to get into business with Hubbard. The idea was that Parsons would front the money, which is about 20k, and then Hubbard would return to his watery ways, buy a yacht and then sell it on for a profit in California. What a business. Surprise, surprise. Hubbard did not.

So the plan was he was going to California, buy a yacht, sail it through to Miami and then sell it for a profit in Miami. Why boats go for more in Miami than they do in California, I do not know. This wasn't like a boat flipping situation. It was just, I'm going to move this boat from one place to another place because I'm so good at sailing and then I'm going to sell it. Yeah. Predictably, he didn't even do that.

He just ran off with the money and with Sarah Northrup. Now you've got your girlfriend and your money. Yeah, exactly. And she soon leveled up from girlfriend to wife in 1946. But Hubbard had never really bothered to divorce Polly and she was still languishing with his children in Montana. But that didn't bother Hubbard at all. Him and Sarah moved to Hollywood, where he beat the shit out of her and received a bunch of psychiatric diagnoses. Hubbard was told that he was paranoid, bipolar, schizophrenic and almost everything in between by a multitude of different doctors. But he took no notice and passed the time by writing an introduction to traumatic psychology, which he described as, quote, making a monkey out of Freud, when actually,

quite a lot of his basic principles are exactly the same as Sigmund's. They just have different made up names. Ah, the classic. Yeah, so just stealing it and calling it something else and then being like, how ridiculous are the foundations of Freud? Soon after this jaunt into the maze of traumatic psychology,

L. Ron Hubbard published the book that would catapult him to a new kind of fame and it was called Dianetics, the modern science of mental health. And just like Alastair Crowley, he claimed that this text had been dictated to him by his guardian angel. He described this work as a phoenix, quote, risen from the ashes of Excalibur which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs and plays the mouth organ with the left foot. Can we please copy and paste this into the review section for our own book? Red handed the book, risen from the ashes of Excalibur.

I have not read Dying Medics. No, I wouldn't have expected that even for this episode. No, just because I refuse to give the Church of Scientology any money for a start. And secondly, I have read A, summaries of it and B, have read a lot of things that people who have read it have said and they're like, it's completely incomprehensible. I think I heard it described once as like, as if someone had taken the first year of a mathematics degree and not really listened and then writes down the equations. But I don't think we need to read it to determine that the mathematics of the human mind, it is not.

Dynetics has been described as a self-referential semantic labyrinth and as such it was published in May 1950 and that is probably my favourite description of a book ever. Yeah. It's like those little phrases we enjoyed. I can't remember which was it. Was it esoteric Hitlerism or something? There was another word in between but I know what you mean. There was, there's some great ones. But you're right, self-referential semantic labyrinth. It's pretty good.

It's pretty good. Maybe we can use it on a hinge prompt. What hinge prompt works with that? What am I looking for? I'm looking for a self-referential semantic labyrinth. Oh my God. I mean, you'd probably get a fair few on that. And it turns out, friends, that we don't actually need to read Dianetics because the Church of Scientology claims that it has sold 18 million copies and is, quote, indisputably the most widely read and influential book on the human mind ever published, which I have tried to corroborate. But it's like all of those restaurants on Brick Lane that say that they are the best curry in the UK.

The best curry house in the UK, the best curry in the UK. You can say what you want. Yeah, yeah, never go to tie-ups. Dianetics can say they're the best curry house in the UK. The best curry house in the UK, the best curry in the UK. You can say what you want. Yeah, yeah, never go to tie-ups. Dianetics can say they're the best curry house in the UK. And I tried to think of like, okay, like what's the most famous like psychoanalysis book or like the most, you know, what's the one you think of first and it's On Dreams by Sigmund Freud. Like that's the one that I would think of first. But I can't find anywhere how many copies of On Dreams have been sold, but it must be more than 18 million. It just must. I mean, the number of, I'm sure, like university syllabuses, syllabi, whatever, On Dreams must

be on. I'm guessing it's more than 18 million have been sold. Yeah, yeah. I just don't believe for a second that Dianetics takes that title, but never mind. And I'm going to do you all a favor by giving you the basics of Dianetics to save you from curiosity and stop you from buying it. Here is essentially all you need to know. It's pretty basic and it's stolen. So Dianetics argues the following, that there are two parts to the mind. There's the conscious or analytical problem-solving mind that holds memories, all of your memories, nothing is ever really forgotten. And this part of the mind is rational and it's aware of itself. So far so

good, right? That seems okay. Then there is the reactive mind. That's where phobias, nightmares, insecurities and destruction lives. This part of the mind doesn't think and it doesn't hold memories. It holds things that are not quite memories that can reproduce in their own image and are sentient. Now we're getting a bit, now we're getting into it. So they're not quite memories, but they can control you essentially. And these not quite memories are called engrams. And when they are activated, when they self-produce, they can control a person's actions. Okay. So it's like levelling up of the lizard brain idea, but to an nth degree.

Or not even the lizard brain. It's a very rudimentary way of saying that trauma stays in your brain and then traumatizes the rest of your brain. Okay, got it. So trauma is infectious in the brain. Exactly. And no one wants to be controlled by rapidly dividing cells that you don't even know exist. But luckily, Erwin Hubbard has the answer. Because engrams can be eliminated when the details that cause them to grow in the first place are recited repeatedly until they no longer possess any type of emotional charge. And in this way, quote, Dianetics deletes all the pain of a lifetime.

I see. So like exposure therapy. Yes. Yeah. Well, not even exposure, just talking about it. Talking about it again and again and again, which is not you know, not a million miles from psychotherapy. Well this is the thing, isn't it? But it's interesting because obviously depending on what you've got, whether it's depression or anxiety, obviously we know that those two things can be co-morbid, but for example, my friend who has anxiety was accidentally sent to psychotherapy and then was forced to talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, which is obviously what you do there. And not forced, but, you know,

encouraged to. And actually all it did was make her hyperfixate on her anxieties when what she should have been going to was CBT. Again, I am not a therapist, I am not a doctor, go get professional help if you need to talk about these things. But interesting. So the process by which Hubbard suggests you neutralize these engrams that are ruining your life is called auditing. And the subject is asked by the auditor questions about their traumas until these traumas no longer have any power. And in the early days of Dianetics this auditing usually happened when a person is in a semi hypnotic state, very similar to Freud, because what

Freud would do is have his patients lie down and he would be out of their sight line. That was the whole thing. Exactly the same. So the person's lying down, they're sort of in a sort of meditative state and then Hubbard is asking these quick fire questions. There is a film called The Master in which Philip Seymour Hoffman plays someone who is based upon, literally they might as well have called him like Flell Schron Slobbered. Because obviously they get sued into the ground if they make a film. So it's Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix is in it. And there's a scene in it where Philip Seymour Hoffman is auditing Joaquin Phoenix in this early way of this quick, because

now obviously they have a lot of tech and we'll get into that later, but in the beginning it was just this rapid fire answering questions of like, have you ever slept with a family member? And then you ask it again and again and again until you get the real response and it's very fast. It's a weird film. I don't know if it's even worth a watch to be honest. I've watched a couple of times, but it's the only example I can think of, of like an example of like early Dianetics auditing techniques. It's all a lighthearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid. We're your hosts. I'm Alina Urquhart. And I'm Ash Kelly. And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy. The stories we cover are well researched. Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find

their way to one another and merge into one larger group. With a touch of humor. Shout out to her. Shout out to all my therapists out there. There's been like eight of them. A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing. That mother f***er is not real! And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the way back machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast, Morbid. Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to episodes early and ad free by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad free by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really question what's real? Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices? Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr.ollin's Medical Mysteries, and each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries

that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries, Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Spotify or Apple podcasts. So someone who has no engrams, so you've done so much auditing that they're all gone, you've neutralized them all, you are completely in control of yourself, no engrams are controlling you. When you get to that stage, you are called by L. Ron Hubbard, clear. And a clear person,

according to Dianetics, can remember everything they've ever read, everything that's ever happened to them. And they can also do really quick mental maths and are the best at chess in the world. Interesting. Interesting benefits. So Dianetics happened to be published amid a post-war self-help boom and it spent 28 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. That's pretty good going. That is very good going. Those who loved it were almost outnumbered by those who hated it. It was quite divisive. It was very like a Marmite situation.

Because it was of course absolutely rejected by the scientific community almost unanimously and this cemented Hubbard's hatred of doctors and, above all, psychiatrists, who he said were, quote, straight out of terrorist textbooks, and were the sole reason for the decline of the universe and should be hounded down. In the swells of the success of Dianetics, Hubbard set up a school to train auditors to carry out his Dianetic wisdom. In order to join the course, you had to buy the book and attend Hubbard's lectures and all of a sudden, Elrond Hubbard was rich. Despite his riches though, he didn't produce his first clear until a few months after the

book was published and it was a total disaster. The unveiling happened at an auditorium in LA and the subject was Sonia Bianca, a physics student from Boston. Sonia, however, couldn't even tell the audience the contents of Dianetics, let alone everything that had ever happened to her. It's a total disaster. Like literally members of the audience are like, what's on page 22 of Dianetics? And she doesn't know. Even though you are, of course, meant to have remembered everything you've ever read. Or everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever done.

She literally can't even tell the audience what colour tie on Hubbard is wearing. Like it's a complete humiliation. Oh dear. Oh dear. So after this catastrophe, another clear wouldn't appear for 16 years. During this period of success and humiliation, Hubbard and Sarah were living at the Chateau Marmont and Hubbard was beating the shit out of Sarah still. He didn't want to be married

anymore to her, but divorce would be too shameful, despite their marriage being a bigamous one in the first place, which meant that technically they weren't even really married. Hubbard told Sarah that the only way out of his predicament was that she had to kill herself if she really loved him. That's a red flag. Yeah, just a baby one. Well, firstly, this is all of your fault and you have to help me get out of this situation by killing yourself because that's the right thing to do. Yes, please.

So Sarah, feeling guilty that her not-husband was completely unhinged, did the right thing, paid attention to the red flags and got the fuck out. She moved to a Dianetics training center in LA, but Hubbard was convinced that she was still trying to ruin him from afar, or worse, section him. This is the thing, because Sarah's whole life is Elrond Hubbard and Elrond Hubbard's whole life is Dianetics, she can't get that far away from him. He's always going to know where she is. Sarah and Hubbard had a daughter called Alexis who was touted as the world's first Dianetic baby. It sounds like she's not real. She definitely is real, so I feel bad saying this but like her life is really quite fantastical. So she's audited her whole life. She's speaking

when she's really, really, really young. And this next bit is probably the most chilling piece of research I've ever, ever, ever come across in my life. So Sarah took Alexis with her when she ran away from Hubbard. And one night, Sarah left Alexis with a babysitter. And this babysitter is holding Alexis, who's a literal baby, maybe not even one years old or maybe like one year old. And Alexis whispers in this babysitter's ear, don't sleep. No thanks. Screams, screams.

And apparently the voice in which Alexis says this is like this like horse like whisper like an old man. The babysitter's like, I didn't even know babies could make that noise. No, and can one year old speak? She can, cause she's the first dianetic baby. Well, there you go. That is quite enough to put the shits up anyone.

And unnerved, the babysitter put the world's first Dianetic baby to bed. And later that night, Alexis was abducted by Hubbard's men. Sounds very Tom Cruise. Leave him out of it. He's next week. Later on, these men returned for Sarah, saying that they would kill her child if she didn't go with them. Sarah was dragged into a car where Hubbard was waiting, and then they drove around San Bernardino all night, stopping at every hospital they came across. Hubbard would demand that the staff in these hospitals declare Sarah clinically insane, which is

an odd move for someone who hated psychiatry with every inch of his being. Unsurprisingly, they were turned away at every hospital and in response Hubbard took himself off to Chicago along with the baby to be analyzed himself, to dispel the rousing rumors that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. He got his wish. He managed to find a doctor who said he was just a creative person stressed about work. And this clean bill of health was worn by Hubbard as a badge of honour. Clearly, it wasn't 100% true because immediately after receiving this diagnosis, Hubbard called Sarah that he had killed Alexis, chopped up her baby body into little pieces and watched her arms and legs float down a river. Of course, that wasn't his fault.

It was Sarah's fault for leaving him. She is to blame for all of these things. And also somebody who would call up their wife-not-wife and tell them that sounds totally perfectly a-okay. Sane, sane, sane stamp on the hand. He's fine. Stable, stable and perfectly well. After this Sarah searched for Alexis for weeks. As long as Hubbard had their baby, he had total control of the situation and Sarah was unfortunately completely tied to him. Sarah even tried the FBI,

but they dismissed her perils as quote, just a domestic dispute. Sarah did manage to file for divorce, citing systemic torture, sleep deprivation, strangulation, and scientific torture experiments. But Hubbard didn't care. He was in Havana with baby Alexis, who he kept in a cot with chicken wire over the top.

This story is completely fantastical. Mm-hmm, yep. Not that we don't know these kind of things happen, obviously, being neck deep in the world of true crime, we know that these kind of things happen, but we have to remember, guys, isn't just like the pasto version of Dianetics and Scientology before anybody knew who he was. He was already a public figure at this point that this is happening. His fucking book was at the top of the New York Times

bestseller list for half a year. He's well known. Oh yeah. I will say that it's very interesting though. In Havana, they love you to know where Ernest Hemingway stayed. They love you to know which daiquiri bar was Ernest Hemingway's favorite daiquiri bar. Not a sniff on Hubbard in Cuba. Probably a good idea. So, unable to not tell a lie, literally ever, Hubbard told Sarah that he was working as a spy in Cuba. Is his go-to? Yeah. I was somewhere I was not supposed to be out spying. told Sarah that he was working as a spy in Cuba. Sarah Is this go-to? I was somewhere I was not supposed to be out spying. Sarah I'm being a spy. I'm working with the CIA.

I'm doing something incredibly more important and interesting than what it is that I'm actually doing. Sarah, she obviously has a very tough run of it, but she does eventually manage to get a divorce. She probably could have just said, I need a divorce because he was already married and he never got a divorce from his first wife So please can I have a divorce? And also he's in Cuba Yeah, and he's got my fucking baby and thankfully she also manages to get baby Alexis back Sarah Northrup described that day as the happiest in her life It was during this time in Cuba that Elron Hubbard wrote his next work called The Science of Survival,

which included what he called the Tone Scale, which is apparently ripped straight off from Hinduism, every cult leader's fucking favourite go-to religion. And essentially if you're wondering what the Tone Scale is, it's basically a rating system for people's virtues. 4 is being completely clear and people below a two bring death to themselves or those around them. Perverts are placed at a 1.5 and anybody who's on the scale at a mere 1.1 will apparently abort a child. And the list of course goes on from there. Yeah, it categorises people as being the goodness or the badness of them based on the type of

things that they do. And it's coming back to what we were talking about with the status game, which is the idea of competence, dominance and virtue. Here he's weaponizing virtue. Yeah, totally. And it's like if you do... Which sounds very familiar. Doing one thing wrong puts you at a 1.5 or a 1.1.

And to move up the tone scale, guess what you have to do? Do you have to get audited? You have to do what he says. Uh-huh. So a clear person, somebody who scores a four on this tone scale, is apparently accident proof. Apparently they can't get ill, they can't be hypnotized. But yet, L. Ron Hubbard cannot prove any of these things still. Yeah, because he can't produce a clear person that can actually do any of these things he just says it and then it gets spun into existence. And this is where things started to go wrong for Hubbard

and when you're famous when it rains it pours. The Dianetics boom had crested and fallen people had moved on from Hubbard's mind philosophy and even worse than that copycats had started to pop up, and thus Dianetics as a concept was diluted, and Hubbard almost forgotten. His Dianetics Audit Training Foundation went bust and he was left with no wife, no money, and living in a trailer in Kansas, which he was not a fan of. But even though he had fallen from grace, Hubbard managed to keep some fans of his own. And one of these fans, not Hubbard, invented the E-meter, which Hubbard unveiled in 1952, along with his new wife Mary Sue Whipp, who was 20 years his junior, and a new era began.

Dianetics was repackaged by Hubbard as Scientology. He claimed that the meaning of the word Scientology is the study of knowledge, which in itself is a self-referential semantic nightmare that only folds in on itself even more the longer you stare at it. So let's leave that aside for a second and let's talk about the E-meter. You might have seen a picture of it. It's these two metal cans that held together with like crocodile clips and then this there's like a dial that the auditor is looking at and the arrow sort of swings depending on how fucked up you are.

Essentially the way it works and don't tell Tom Cruise I told you It's a dumbed down lie detector. That's what it is. A dumbed down version of something that already doesn't do what it's meant to do. So it monitors changes in your body when you're thinking about certain things, it's the argument. And even people who are vocal critics of Scientology have gone through it themselves. They're being like, there is something about the E-meter that does work. For sure. I mean, it's basically like there are things about a polygraph machine or a lie detector that work, but it doesn't work in what it's saying it does.

What it does is measures your physiological response to stress or to questioning. So it isn't detecting deception, it's just detecting increased heart rate, increased sweating, but that could be caused by so many other things. So I can believe the emitter is sensing something and possibly even getting it right a couple of times, but there's no universal physiological response to all types of stress or all types of stimuli or deception. So therefore, what can you really be measuring? I think the argument is that if you're looking at engrams, which are trauma related, the needle jumps when you are stressed about your trauma, and then you can zone in on where

the needle jumps and what you were thinking about at that particular moment in time. Do I think it's useful? No, but a lot of people do, but never mind. So instead of the person being asked the questions by an auditor being in a semi-Nottic Freudian type lying down on a couch state, now the person audited has to hold onto these metal cans that measure changes in electrical resistance. And I think, you know, I don't know if it's exactly the same theory here at play, but we also know that placebos work, right? And we also know, a lot of research studies show this, that the more complicated or complex the ritual for taking of the placebo or partaking in the placebo is, the more effective it is. So maybe they just hit onto this idea that

instead of just lying there and doing this, if you give people cans to hold and then you have something that flashes and dings when they say something, it's even more convincing. It will compound the belief in whatever they're being told even more, possibly. Oh, exactly. And that's what Hubbard's going for because he is saying that this e-meter Scientology featuring Dianetics is the scientific path to spiritual discovery which a lot of people are looking for. People have been looking for spiritual discovery forever but now he's like I've got the science. And it's at the time period like you said when science fiction was having a boom

it was at a time when people were ready to at least, although it still would have been taboo to some extent, the idea of atheism and the idea of putting your trust in science more than anything else. So he's kind of hitting on a perfect crossroads. Oh, it's a niche. There are a lot of people looking for it. So the idea is that the E-meter detects mental masses in inverted commas or engrams and then auditing. So the question asking breaks those down and finds the source of spiritual distress. And when the blockage is cleared, the little needle on the screen of the E-meter will float. That's what you want.

You want a floating needle. You don't want it one end or the other. And a clear person, when they're being asked questions, they are so at peace. They are so free in their minds. A clear person will have a floating needle no matter what you ask them. It's genius. It really is genius because having somebody sit there and tell you that you're clear or that your engrams are going crazy or whatever phraseology they're using is one

thing. Having a machine in front of you that is beeping and a needle that is wiggling about that shows you visually, it's kind of like almost he's gamified therapy. That's exactly what it is. It's very smart. I kind of think it's smart by accident. Take away all of the negative things about Scientology, which we won't be doing, don't worry, we are going to fully go in for it next week. What he has achieved is quite impressive, but I don't think he meant to do it. I know there is a fine line between genius and madman, but I know which side I think he was on.

And they're also not mutually exclusive necessarily, but also the thing I would say is doing Sinister Societies, the new podcast we're doing, Spotify, where we're literally recording like two or three episodes of cult-based activity every single week at the moment, it really has compounded in me the idea that cult leaders, demagogues, autocrats, all these kind of people, sometimes of course they're intelligent, sometimes of course it's well thought out and planned, but a lot of them are just doing what needs to be done purely by instinct. They just instinctively know. Also, if you spend literally all of your time only thinking about how to defraud and manipulate people, we also would be pretty good at it. I think that's the thing.

I think a lot of happy accidents happen for Elm and Hubbard, which turn into lots of very unhappy accidents for millions of other people. Bingo. So the E-meter wasn't the only new idea on the block. Freud hating Hubbard nicked more ideas and decided that engrams could be formed from prenatal memories. So now we're saying it's not even engrams developed

while you're living your life. It is in the womb. As early as that, you can develop these engrams. These sperm dreams soon gave way to engrams being formed in previous lives and the Dianetics Foundation didn't like this one bit and they actually tried to ban any past life chat from the practice, feeling that it fundamentally undermined the doctrine. I don't really know why you're fucking bothering to draw that distinction at this distinction. I think it is a distinction though, because it's making it more about spiritualism and less about like therapy, right? So if you're

saying that like, things have happened to you and therefore you are acting like this because of this thing that is controlling you because it was created by something that happened to you. If you're then saying it was created by a past life version of you, that means you're completely not in control of why it's there in the first place. So when we say prenatal, we're not saying it happened in the womb, we're talking about something that happened in a past existence.

So it starts off with the in the womb, and then you're like, well, while I'm here, you might as well be like, oh, I was Julius Caesar. Interesting. Anyway, let's not get too sidetracked by what the fuck they think is going on. What we need to know is that the Dianetics Foundation are like, we think you've taken it a step too far, Mr. Hubbard.

Yeah, yes, yes. So the mistake that Hubbard had made with Dianetics was that he was not the source of absolute truth. That is a major problem for a would-be cult leader. And so he changed his angle. N-grams were no longer the soul focus and Hubbard moved on to thetans. What is a thetan, I hear you scream? Well, it's kind of like a soul, but it's not inside the body. Rather, it's attached to it. And when a person goes exterior, which

is the Scientology term for an out-of-body experience, it is the Phaeton that is doing that. I mean, I need so much more coffee to understand what is going on here. It's all just made up, it's all made up, so stay with us as much as you possibly can, right? Scientologists basically believe that the body is just physical and it actually stands in the way of the Phaeton. Which is not a million miles away from literally every other religion. The only difference is that most Western religions will say that your soul, your Thetan, is inside of you. Whereas Scientology is like, it's there, it's around. It's just hanging about. And another potential trouble source for

one's Thetan is to be oppressed by other people. Those people are called Suppressive Persons or SPs, which we will come to learn more about in next week's episode. I guess like a Suppressive Person, can we call them like an energy vampire? Yeah. But the problem here is that their definition of what is Suppressive is anybody questioning the stuff they're telling you. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Like I think everyone has come into contact with suppressive people who, for whatever reason, are trying to make sure you don't do your best, which in itself is like, it's just like, oh, toxic person, walk the other way. That's a fine thing. The problem with SPs in Scientology is that what they are defined as is quite problematic. Yes. Yes. Scientology was not what they are defined as is quite problematic. Yes. Scientology was not going to get away from Hubbard in the same way that Dianetics had done. He was now the central figure and not just the founder and he had lost the rights to the term Dianetics. Isn't that tragic? Sort your shit, Hubbard. Jesus Christ. That's

how far Dianetics gets away from you. Rule, yeah, yeah. I mean rule number one, you're going to have a cult. You need to place yourself at the centre of it as the only knower of absolute truth. Pan, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, pen, no, no. And it was around this time too that Hubbard famously said, quote, I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is. And he's right, because salvation is, of course, always in demand. And just like that, on the 18th of February 1954, the Church of Scientology of California was established, and one cropped up in DC soon after. The tagline that is still repeated today is, the goal of Dianetics is a sane world. Without insanity, without criminals, and without war,

it can be stopped only by the insane. Which, okay, it's not a terrible message to have. No war, no criminal, no drugs. You know, sure, that sounds okay. The move from psychotherapy to full-blown religion might seem a little bit of an odd one on the surface, but it really isn't, especially when you look at it from a shamanic angle, which lucky for you, my little sausages, was what I did my dissertation on. I did my dissertation on the medicalization of madness and my supervisor literally quit because it was such a mind maze. When someone either converts to a religion or is a religious person, they're like, it makes me better.

Was it a self-referential, semantic labyrinth? Absolutely. He was just like, I don't, you are aware this is an anthropology degree, not philosophy, and I was like, well it's too late now. Anyway, fine, got a 2-1 in the end, even though he literally disappeared. So religious people are like, being religious, my religion, my faith, makes me happy, it makes me better. It helps me with my drug addiction or with my life. And that's what everyone wants.

It's also the same goal of psychotherapy. You want to be better, you wanna feel right. So actually, they're the same thing. And madness used to be seen as this like light, like in King Lear the Fool's, the only one that tells the truth, right? And then through the medicalization of madness, Foucault's dissertation is called Madness and Civilization. Read it if you don't want to be alive. That's the point is that like madness has moved from a positive thing to

a negative thing through the structures of capitalism. So actually, psychotherapy and religion, hand in hand, happy bedfellows, it's not that much of a jump because their goals are the same to the person. The sort of the structure of the religion may have different goals, like making lots of money, but for the individual person, the goal is the same. So let's talk about what Scientology actually is. And funnily enough, the pillars of Scientological belief in the very beginning to where we are now in 2022, are basically the same. Which is, you know, it's okay for a religion. A lot of them change their minds. So here we go. There are three tiers of Scientologists. Most of them, vast majority of Scientologists are public Scientologists.

They're your normal everyday people. They pay for books, courses, auditing sessions. They're usually approached by smiling people in the street and then hooked in that way with a free like stress test. And a vast majority of Scientologists stay on this lowly tier. Then we move on to big money items. Tier two of Scientology is inhabited by the famous people. That's your Tom Cruise's, your John Travolta's, your Laura Prepons, although I do believe she has very recently left. And these people have to be vocal about their involvement in the Church. They're an attraction. Normal Scientologists on the lower tier are tempted with the idea of rubbing shoulders

with the stars, but actually they don't really get anywhere near them. And normals don't have to be as vocal about their involvement in the Church. They're just foot soldiers and no one really cares what they think. The third tier is the Sea Organization. It is the clergy of Scientology, the truly hardcore, those who administer the church, audit people, and these days rule with an iron fist. Hubbard first came up with the idea of the Sea Org

when he was living in Sussex. He bought a massive estate from the Maharaja of Jaipur, declared himself a doctor of horticulture, connected e-meters to tomato plants, and told gardening magazines that plants can get worried too. There is a very, very funny picture of him holding up a tomato plant, being like, see, has feelings, excellent.

But soon he got bored of tomato emotions and decided to start recruiting the spine of his Scientological empire, the Sea Org. Hubbard was a Navy man, so the Sea Org was run like a military operation aboard ships. The handy thing about big boats is that if you are in international waters, the taxman can't get you, and it's also very difficult to extradite you anywhere

to do time for any of your many crimes. The other thing about the Sea Org is that in order to enroll, one has to sign the famous Billion Year Contract. The argument behind the Billion Year Contract is obviously, since Hubbard decided that past lives are part of his deal now, the argument is that if you are in the Sea Org, in all of your lives to come, you will come back to Scientology somehow. So you are signing over your coming lives to Scientology also. And there is a further theory that if you get to clear and then operating

thing level, which we'll come on to, if you get up to those higher tiers, the argument is that you don't actually die, which gets very awkward when people die. So to house his sea organization, Hubbard obtained three ships, one of which, due to a typo on a tax document, was called the Great Scotsman, and he then set sail to build his church. One of his very first recruits was a young bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Hannah Whitfield, who you can see in multiple Scientology documentaries, including Going Clear. Hannah had been raised in a super-radically spiritualist home in South Africa. Her mother was a fervent follower of Helena Blavatsky, a critical figure in the spiritualist movement.

And a crucial part of Hannah's childhood belief system was that the Messiah was coming. He would lead a revolution in the 50s in America and start a new race and most importantly of all he would be ginger. So when Hannah was training as a nurse in Johannesburg and someone handed her a copy of Dianetics she couldn't believe it and immediately she was off to join Scientology and eventually Hannah Whitfield became the 60th recorded clear in the world. In the early years of the Sea Org, recruits from all over the world maintained the fleet of ships, which is essentially a full-time job. And then on top of that, they also audited constantly.

We're talking like cleaning with toothbrushes, like scrubbing the decks, painting stuff. Like these ships are like, they're ships, like they're big. So in themselves, that's a lot of maintenance, but they're also like rust buckets. So they needed doing up. Constant. Oh yeah, around the clock. So while these Sea Org recruits are doing all of this, Hubbard locked himself away in his air-conditioned captain's quarters, took loads of drugs and wrote. He also sent his crew off on various treasure hunts, like a kids party. It's really like, I would say that these years of the Sea Og are not great, but relatively harmless compared to what's to come. It's kind of like he entertains them and he sends

them off on like, because they're going around all over the place, like they're going to Greece, Morocco, Italy, all over, like very beautiful places. So he'll just like make handwritten maps and like send them off for the day to go and find something. And the aim of all this auditing was to create, of course, clear people whose Phaetons could be free. Well, a Phaeton is free, they can fly around the stars unencumbered by earthly shackles. So this is the end game of auditing, to recall the Phaeton to immortality, free of all limitations. I think this is the interesting thing. It's like, obviously, if you are struggling with trauma, if you're struggling with some kind of, you know, mental

illness, go get help, go get therapy, go get whatever relevant treatment or help you need. But the aim is never to become like a perfect person. The aim is to deal with your challenges to become a better person for yourself, a happier person, a happier version of yourself. This is like to become perfect. Yeah, to become superhuman, quite literally superhuman. Which is perfect, really, from a cult perspective, because it's something that can never realistically be achieved. Unobtainable. Exactly. So basically, it is the idea that someone who has audited so hard that they can now exist without physical support and assistance is an operating phatom or an OT.

So once you're clear, that's the next step. Clear isn't the end anymore. You're clear and then you're an OT and there are eight levels of OT that we know about and they're rumoured to be 9 and 10. So yeah, varying varying levels and fun fact, Tom Cruise is apparently an OT level 8. He is an OT 8, he's very proud of it. Well if I'd have spent that much I would also want to at least say that I was proud of him. Well yeah, OT 8 is as we understand it, the highest you can get. I see. And it's even more impressive when you put it into context because according to Hubbard, quote, and this is a quote, neither Buddha nor Jesus were OTs. According to the

evidence they were just a shade above clear. But Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is an OT level 8. So when someone gets to OT level 2, which they can do by taking multiple courses that cost money, reading a billion books that cost money and paying just loads of money, which costs money, they are taught how to delete implanted engrams from their past lives. So up until OT 2, you're dealing with your own life, right? And then OT 2, they're like, okay, so psych

all of that work you've done. Now we need to look at who you were before and deal with those underlying engrams. And that's OT2. Got it. Got it. And the really big news happens on OT3 level. This is the big shit. This is the big shit. This is the phase that Hubbard dubbed the wall of fire. And it's essentially Scientology's kind of Garden of Eden story, the how we all ended up here story. And it was first unveiled to the Sea Org in 1968 aboard a ship called Apollo. And I really hope, try, try very hard everybody, to be ready for this next part. Because Scientology says that if you are not ready, if you have not yet worked your way to OT Level 3, then the information that you are about to hear will quite literally kill you.

Yep. You will get pneumonia and you will die. Have we made a terrible decision? Do we want to kill all of our listeners? Well proceed at your own risk. But I will say that I have read it quite some weeks ago and I am fine apart from all of the pre-existing conditions I have. I haven't got any new ones. Just the pre-existing engrams. Yeah, just, you know, the depression and the anxiety.

But you know, it's fine. But you know, we're not insured for this. So it's on you, player. Maybe we should get some insurance before we do this. Well, it's too late. I don't think anyone insures you against Elrond Hubbard. So, insures you against mind-melting facts being floated into your ears via a podcast. Yeah. The only reassurance I can give you is that this information has been published

many times. It is openly available on the internet and I have read it and I am still here, but proceed at your own risk. So here we are, we're all about to be OT level three. My name is Madison McGee. From LA Times Studios comes its latest series, LA Crimes. From deep dives into the Menendez brothers to conversations about why Bravo TV seems to be a hotbed of white collar criminals, we'll cover it all. We'll speak with LA Times reporters

and others in the true crime industry to put a lens not just white collar criminals, we'll cover it all. We'll speak with LA Times reporters and others in the true crime industry to put a lens not just on these cases, but on our own culture's fascination with them and what that says about us. Tune in every Wednesday wherever you stream your podcasts. At the turn of the 20th century, rapid industrialization, urbanization, and political corruption were ravaging America.

But soon President Theodore Roosevelt and a diverse group of reformers known as progressives would fight back. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry's podcast, American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, we explore the progressive era, which came to be defined by Teddy Roosevelt and others who believed in a strong, active government that worked on behalf of all Americans rather than the privileged few. As the United States entered the 20th century, these progressives hoped to steer the nation in a bold new direction, to launch an era of reform to restore power to the people. Follow American history tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad free and be the first to binge the

newest season only on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today. In the beginning, there were Thetans and they were all godlike and pure and floating around various planets. And then 75 million years ago there was a galactic confederacy which was made up of 76 planets and 26 stars. And according to Hubbard the world we live in now replicates the civilization of that period. People at that particular time and place were walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes we wear this very minute. The cars they drove looked exactly the same and the trains they ran looked the same and the boats they had looked the same circa 1950-1960. So who ruled this confederacy? You might have heard this name once or twice.

Is it, yeah, somebody with an unrealistically fantastical name. His name is Xenu. And Xenu was the suppressive to end all suppressives. He'd been chosen by a guard called the loyal officers and they decided that he could no longer rule over the Galactic Confederacy. Xenu had to go, but Xenu wasn't having it. He was like, I'm like it here. I like being the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy. So he took his last moments in office to, and this is a quote, goof the floof. What does that mean? I don't know.

To goof the floof. Are you goofing one's floof? I just can't believe that we have to spend time, that you have spent time being forced to research. And now we are sat here reading out what sounds like a rejected plotline for an Avengers movie. Yes, exactly. But the saving grace is at least I haven't paid millions of dollars to get here. This is true. This is true. So Zinu, he wants to keep hold of the Galactic Confederacy. He's like,

you can't tell me what to do. I'm Zinu. So he gets his pals together and his pals are mainly evil psychiatrists. And they tell the populace, the population of the Galactic Confederacy, that they all need to come in for tax auditing. And then when they come in to have their taxes looked at, Zeno and his troops are waiting. And all of the Theatons go in like lambs to the slaughter, to the tax office. And then Zeno's waiting there with his minions. And what they would do to all of the Theatons is, so Theatons don't have bodies, right? That's a key thing. But the way that Xenu's minions get them is to shoot a frozen needle full of alcohol and glycol into their lungs, which I don't know

if they have, but apparently in this version of events, thetans do have bodies and even lungs that can be paralyzed with alcohol and glycol. So anyway- Maybe when they were back in the day, godlike, they had bodies. I mean, stranger things have happened. Why not? So when the Thetans are all frozen up, they're packaged into boxes and they're loaded into space planes.

Billions of Thetans were transported to Tegiak, which is the planet that we morons now call Earth. And the Thetans are dropped in their boxes into volcanoes and then those volcanoes are blown up with hydrogen bombs. But obviously, Thetans are immortal. So now they are free to float around on the winds of explosion and trapped in an electronic ribbon and forced to watch a 3D super colossal motion picture for 36 days. I wish I understood that and could explain it to you. I don't. And then there's a civil war in the galaxy

and Xenu is locked up in an electric wire cage, buried in a mountain. On Earth, but you'll be glad to hear it's very unlikely that he'll ever get out. It's like a ten-year-old wrote. It quite literally is. I'm shocked that this man wrote a thousand books. I mean, the thing is, I don't know what the thing is. If a ten-year-old wrote this, I would be super impressed. Yeah. So because Xenu's locked up in a metal wire cage made of electricity, Tia Gak or Earth was classified as a prison planet and it was abandoned by the Confederacy.

Invaders came and went, but the Phaetans stayed on Earth for 75 million years. And when people showed up, the Phaetans started to attach to people because they no longer had a free will of their own. And these thingstans that are left over from Zinu's catastrophic takeover of the Galactic Confederacy, they're called body thetans to us humans because they attach to people and fuck their shit up. And they're also the reason that so many civilizations have fallen into ruin on Earth because we have never solved the body thetan problem. So if you're on OT2 you're looking at your past lives,

how to solve that. Once you've done that, you get to OT3 and you learn that even though you have your own theton, which you can go exterior with, and even though you've solved all your present life engrams, and even though you've solved the implants from past lives, now you have body thetons that you've got to get rid of and they are everywhere. Nightmare. It's like the goalposts keep being moved. For someone's personal gain. But Hubbard has the problem to the body thetan problem because the goal of Scientology is, of course, to eliminate the body thetan problem with auditing. And when all of mankind is clear, then we can stop the destructive cycle and the earth will live on forever.

Perfect. So he's saying all of the stuff that Jesus couldn't do, all of the stuff that Buddha couldn't do, all of the stuff that Mohammed couldn't do. I've got it. Got it. Got it. With my E-meter. Please hold on to my metal can.

The thing is, the problem is, is that you might be thinking this all sounds pretty crazy. Who would possibly sign up to this? The thing is, no one who has ever signed the billion-year contract has ever read the Xenu story because by the time they get to read the Xenu story, they're in too deep. Yeah, no one signs the contract with this information in their brain. Nobody knows this when they sign that contract. They only get it on OT3, which could be decades. So that's exactly what happened to our pal, Hannah Eltringen. She was one of the first ever to read the Xenostory and she was totally convinced that

it was true. She was given an E-meter and told to audit away all of those pesky body thetans herself. But the thing is, she couldn't find any, no matter how hard she tried, which terrified her because apparently some people are so terrible that they are un-auditable. And Hubbard called these people a dog case. Yeah. So Hannah has left her home in South Africa. She has spent years aboard these ships. And because she has audited so well, her needle is always floating because she's clear, right? She's OT2. And then when she gets to OT3, the needle doesn't move. She can't find these body things. So she convinces herself not that

maybe this information isn't true, but that she must be the problem. Like she must have done something so terrible that she's beyond help. Got it. Got it. Well, that'd be a bummer. Living on a boat for many years and then realizing that you haven't even saved your immortal soul. Well that'd be a bummer. Living on a boat for many years and then realising that you haven't even saved your immortal soul would be a bit of a bummer. So Hannah convinced herself that even after her years of service she just could not be saved. And that wasn't the only thing getting dark aboard the Apollo. Hubbard would frequently throw people overboard. Children who got the terms wrong were sent to sleep in the crow's nest overnight

or he locked them in a literal chokey, all the while proclaiming his ship a floating school of philosophy and quote, the sanest place on earth. He threw people overboard so much they called it overboarding. There was like a term for it. I've heard that term before. Yeah. Yeah. I think anyone who calls themselves or a place or anything the sanest, I'm guessing it's the opposite. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't do that. So a real turn for the worse happened when Hubbard had a motorbike accident. He broke his arm and loads of ribs. But Hubbard being Hubbard refused all medical treatment. Because who needs medical treatment? Who needs a medical intervention when you've broken several bones in your body? Not this guy. And in fact, it wasn't just refusing all medical treatment. He actually didn't even try and heal himself with Scientology, but that's probably

pretty telling because I'm sure he knew that if he tried and then miraculously didn't heal all of his bones, then he'd probably have quite a lot of uncomfortable questions to answer. With his broken arm and his broken ribs, he just sat in a room throwing things and issuing punishments. This really is a bit of a fork in the road. Terrible things are happening aboard the Apollo, which is like the main ship, and then there are two other ones, but it does get significantly worse after this accident because he's just angry and in pain all the time. But no one is like, but you're the Messiah, surely you should be able to fix this. They just do what they're told.

It's weird that he doesn't secretly go get medical help. This is my theory. I think that Hubbard was extremely unwell. I think that like to the point where he genuinely believes that doctors are evil. I think he genuinely did believe that. Yeah. And this is the problem. It's this idea of like, I'm just who I am. I'm just being crazy and you're trying to therapy me. You're trying to change me to fit the cookie cutter mold of what the world wants me to be. No, you're very unwell. Please get some help, Elrond Hubbard, because you're ruining loads of people's lives.

Yeah, I think that is the basis of it. Because a lot of people make the argument that as time goes on, he starts to amass all of this wealth, blah, blah, blah. And he doesn't live a comfortable life. He lives at sea in one room, writing, writing, writing, writing. So a lot of people use that as the example of like, he did really believe in what he was doing. Otherwise, why wouldn't he have spent all this money? Why would he be living in a one room on a ship blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that is a reasonably strong argument that unlike a lot of cult leaders- Who are narcissistic, which isn't a mental condition. What he has is, I think you're

right. I think he is sick. Yes. I think he's very unwell. And I think that he at least partially genuinely believed that doctors were evil. He probably believed in body things. He definitely believed that he was the source of truth. I do think that like, you know, he had a good thing going for sure. Like a lot of people use that argument, like, Oh, well why didn't he just cut and run with all the money if it was a scam, if he didn't really believe in it. And like, there is the argument of like,

well he had a good thing fucking going but he didn't actually have it that good he just stayed in a room you know yeah it's hard to know because you know we can't peer into his mind and see what he was actually I don't want to go there and I don't want to go there we see with cult leaders time and time again one of their most common features is they never know when to quit they never know when they've got a good thing and they should just cut and run but also his behavior does seem to point at the fact that maybe he genuinely believed it I don't't know. You can choose your own

adventure with that. Yeah. So during this time where he's in a lot of pain doing a lot of shouting and throwing things he also announced something called Flag Order 343RB which basically meant he could decide that any OT, whatever level they were on, had to start again if he said so. Oh hello. Hello, goalpost. Mm-hmm. Kicking me in the face. Yep-a-dee-yep.

He's like, it's actually quite difficult for me to come up with another Xenu story, so I'll just send you back to the starting line. Do not pass go, do not hurt $200. There's no reason you can't get reinfected with all the N-grams. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what that does is it kept the whole of the Sea Org

in a perpetual cycle of audits with no one ever becoming top dog. And the chosen people who were OTs that got picked to start again, they would be put on what was called a rehab program, which meant they would spend 80% of their time in the hottest part of the ship in boiler suits, eating with their hands out of buckets and sleeping on stained mattresses on the floor. This imprisonment eventually became the blueprint for the Scientology drug rehabilitation apparatus called the Purification Rundown. Even though Hubbard was high most of the time, nobody else was allowed to be. If anyone was causing trouble or even slipping into psychosis,

Hubbard's solution was to isolate them totally and let them speak to no one. And he basically did the same thing himself, locking himself away, writing, writing, writing. He totally lost interest in his wife, or anyone else for that matter, no sexual interest at all for Hubbard. But everyone else aboard the fleet was at it like rabbits, and that, because there's no pharmacies at sea, meant babies. In the early days, Hubbard sent any new parents away, but now there were just too many, so his plan was to decree that no one in the sea org could get pregnant without his

express permission. And it didn't take long before women were sent off to have abortions under threat, a practice that is still alive and well today. Which is interesting because a lot of other cults desperately want to grow their population by procreating. Yeah, I think it's multi-layered. I think Hubbard didn't particularly like children. And also if you're on a boat, there is limited room. And also I would argue possibly that once people become parents, especially when women

become mothers and you have a child, there is arguably then an incentive for you to maybe think more critically about wellbeing. Yes, that's true. And you're like, maybe I don't want to hang out on this fucking gross ship, sleep on a dirty mattress because now I've got a child that I care about more than you. Exactly. I think people are always going to... Their priorities change. You don't want to give them something to care about more than your fucking bullshit. So there were problems on land for Hubbard as well. He was a wanted criminal in multiple countries, mainly for things like tax fraud, which if you've

listened to Sinner Societies, you'll see is how they always seem to get caught. But he wasn't really bothered about any of that. He was much more bothered by the publication of the first major criticism of Scientology. And this came from British journalist Paulette Cooper, who wrote an article called The Scandal of Scientology, after a friend of hers told her about his enrollment in the church and his subsequent discovery through auditing that he was actually Jesus. That's going to set off some alarm bells, I would think, especially if you're a journalist.

Yes, I mean, if you were to come and tell me that, Hannah, we'd have a conversation about it. You would section me. I would section you. Cooper always felt strongly about the need to speak up. She didn't write anything particularly ground-breaking. She just wrote that Hubbard had made up all of his credentials, which he had, and that he had conned people out of money, which he was. But after her article was published in Queen magazine,

Cooper's life was ruined by Scientology. Would we say she's the first official account of somebody being fair-gamed? I would say so, yeah. Yeah. She was followed, her phone was tapped, she was sued 19 times, her name and number were written on toilet doors. There was even an assassination attempt by a man dressed as a florist. 300 of her neighbours received letters saying that she was a sex worker riddled with disease who molested children and her Psychiatric files were stolen and sent to her parents

And on top of all of that she was charged with mailing bomb threats to the Church of Scientology of which she was indicted in 1973 by a grand jury Hubbard and his minions had somehow got hold of her fingerprint and they planted it on a letter that was submitted as evidence got hold of her fingerprint and they planted it on a letter that was submitted as evidence. The plan to bring Cooper down was called Operation Free Count and it was a total success. As Cooper's life crumbled, Hubbard was just getting richer and richer. He wrote policy letters to his disciples ordering them to make more and more money. He had multiple foundations that funneled cash into personal accounts. In the mid-70s, we know that Hubbard had one Swiss account with more than $300 million in it. That's just one account.

So, he didn't spend nearly any of his wealth though, and as he approached his mid-60s, he was in terrible health. He was obese and he had smoked his entire life. After a few weeks in hospital in Curaçao, it became clear that a life at sea was entirely unfeasible for the science fiction writer. So Hubbard left his boat and set up shop in Clearwater, Florida. He bought a hotel called the Fort Harrison, where Mick Jagger apparently wrote the lyrics to Satisfaction. But Hubbard was not satisfied. He became more and more paranoid. He slept with guards outside of his room. He was convinced that someone was swapping his left shoe for one that was

half a size too small in order to gaslight him into insanity. I think you're already there, my friend. And his behaviour only got worse when a tailor leaked to the community that Hubbard was in town. This, and the suicide of his son Quentin, propelled Hubbard into a new, and some would say final, phase. If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, Los Angeles is the maternity ward of questionable religious sects. And that is where Hubbard headed next.

The reason that so many cults are born on the Sunset Strip is that LA is full of people looking for the ingredients to make it. Most people are there chasing a dream. They are there because they are looking for something. And apparently in the like 60s and 70s there was like a running joke that's like, oh like first there's drugs and then you go on to Scientology. Hubbard knew that everyone in LA is chasing a dream, everyone is looking for something and he also wanted the other thing that LA is full of, famous people. He went after famous people who were either on their way up or on their way down to attract more people to the church. Again, very smart. Very smart. Celebrity endorsements,

as every social media expert knows, can sell literally anything and Scientology was using that algorithm way before Instagram. Kirsty Alley claimed that her cocaine addiction was cured after just one auditing session. And she also said that if it weren't for Scientology, she would be dead. Is Kirsty Alley still in it? Is Kirsty Alley still in it? I don't know. I think so. I think she's like going to clear water all the time still in it. I see. So these celebrity endorsements did the trick and Scientology figured out that they were on to a good thing so they built the Celebrity Center in LA in 1969 and they continued to hook bigger and bigger

names. Let's look at one of these very big names John Travolta. Objectively before Scientology he was kind of a no-one, and he credits Scientology with putting him in the big time, which obviously drew more showbiz hopefuls in. After he joined, his career got better and better. And again, you can think of it like sort of like a networking group, right? You attack people in. You scratch my back, I scratch your back,

more people join. You've got the likes of like Will Smith is a part of Scientology. Will fucking Smith, what are you doing? But again, it's like, do they really believe in all these crazy fucking engrams or is it just a place to go? Like a secret fucking membership club where they just get a little leg up. I don't know. How much these people really believe, I don't know. I don't know, but I can completely see how young hopefuls would be like, oh, but without Scientology John Travolta would never have made it.

And there's even a clip of John Travolta saying, he was like, oh, they would all still be here if Scientology had been around earlier. Be it Elvis or Marilyn, they would be here today if they were Scientologists. Reel it in, John. Absolutely. And it's not just John Travolta and Will Smith because John Travolta actually brought a lot of big hitters with him too. People like Patrick Swayze, Forrest Whitaker, I did not know that and

Priscilla Presley although Priscilla was the only one who apparently stayed the dist. Yeah, Forrest got out. Thank God. So obviously as you can see from here Tinseltown still had a hold on Hubbard and it always had done. And he threw himself into filmmaking now. Seeing how well Star Wars had done, he wanted a piece of the action. And he turned his 1000-page novel, Revolting the Stars, which happens to be Mitt Romney's favourite book, into a screenplay.

It might as well have been called Space Battle. It's literally just like his attempt to get a cut of that sweet, sweet Star Wars fight. Star Wars revolt in the stars. I mean, you can see that this is really, it's like Charlie Manson, right? He always wanted to be a singer, any opportunity to do that. He's like cult leaders like the side gig man. That's fine.

But what I really want in El Ron Hubbard's case is he wanted his books turned into movies. Yep. We saw them in the past. He got optioned and nothing ever happened. It was probably devastating to him. Elron Hubbard did this. So he did the revolt in the stars or whatever. A screenplay with the help of legendary acting coach Milton Castellus who was somewhat of a Hollywood kingmaker. He brought him even more superstardom hopefuls, and he made 10% commission on anyone he brought into the church. Milton Castellus had an invitation only acting workshop. Everyone was like, if you get into that class, you're going to make it. He's like OT4 or something.

Again, genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he just has this endless conveyor belt of people who will do literally anything he says and he just boots them down the road to Hubbard. It is the ideal business model if you don't mind being a horrible piece of shit. If you have no ethics at all, it's the perfect grime. Absolutely. But as the millions kept pouring in, Hubbard was falling apart at the scenes. To make him feel a bit better, a special section of the Sea Org known as the Guardians made a short

film to cheer him up. It went down like a sack of shit. Hubbard was convinced, because he's paranoid, that the Guardians were mocking him and the whole thing was a total disaster. And guess who was behind it? Seventeen-year-old, dead-eyed Dave, David Miscavige himself. Miscavige was from Pennsylvania and his father Ron had got the whole family into Scientology when David's asthma had been cured by auditing. A little David was as devout as they come. When he hit 16 he dropped out of school and signed that sweet sweet billion-year contract. I find nothing more insidious than children and teenagers

who are devout or pious. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really sickening. No, it really is. Someone like 40 plus, being a weird religio, I'm like, whatever, man, whatever. Your time is gone. But children and teenagers, I'm like, you need a slap. You should be questioning everything at this age. Where's the rebellion? But then I guess maybe is it at a time when the counterculture was to be more conservative? I

don't know. It could be because you kind of see that across time as like when the parents are too hippie, the kids become more conservative. Yeah, I think he hated school and he thought that there were no morals. There were no ethics at school. And his dad also joined the military very, very young. So he was like, oh, I'll just do that. But I love Scientology. Within months of joining, little Dead Eye David was right by Hubbard's side, taking the place of his dead son Quentin. And soon Miscavige was promoted to the role of acting chief. Essentially, dead-eyed David Miscavige became L. Ron Hubbard's enforcer. I'm talking his point, he's still a fucking teenager. Yeah, yeah, and he gets that quick too.

Oh mate, that's scary. He knows exactly what he's doing. That is terrifying. I'm more scared of David Miscavige. Oh, 100%. Than of anyone. Oh, you should be. But on the 14th of February, 1980, Hubbard slipped from public view along with his closest

aides, Pat and Annie Broker, leaving Miss Cavage as his public mouthpiece. It became very difficult for anyone to know what Hubbard's ideas were and what were actually Miss Cavages because no one was allowed anywhere near Hubbard. Another genius play. Absolutely. That included his current wife at that time, Mary Sue. Mary Sue was desperately ill with chronic pancreatitis, but that didn't stop the church from putting her up for all of Hubbard's wrongdoing.

Essentially, what they do, this whole thing is puppeted by Miscavige. What they do is every company, every account, blah, blah, blah, they're all changed over into Sue's name. So the buck stops with her. And the idea was that Hubbard had given this order because he didn't want to be worried about it. He was like, oh, just Sue will do it. So everything went to plan for our own Hubbard and Mary Sue was found guilty and he got away with all of it and she ended up being sentenced to five years and she never heard from her husband ever again and of course this despicable plan was supported by Miss Cavage. Next Miss Cavage set up what is now called Gold Base in Gilman Hot Springs,

California, where tales of violence, spitting and screaming have echoed ever since. In 1982, Miss Cavage married Shelley. She was just 21, innocent, unknowing and thrown into the middle of a storm that was only going to get worse. With Hubbard essentially out of the picture, Miss Cabbage had extremely large fish to fry. In 1985, a $15 million lawsuit was brought against the church by a former Sea Org member called Lawrence Wallisham. Lawrence claimed that he had been brainwashed, emotionally abused, disconnected from his family and pushed into a psychosis that shattered his sense of identity. In this trial, the Wall of Fire, the OT3xeno story, was submitted

as evidence. Which as I'm sure you can imagine, the church didn't take particularly well. When we say they didn't take it well, they stalked the judge, slashed his car tyres and they drowned his dog in his pool. Yeah, bad news. And then there was another lawsuit filed by someone called Christopherson Titchbourne who claimed that she had seen blatant sexual abuse of children in training sessions which apparently was called bull-baiting. And what Christopherson wanted was a $30,000 refund from the church. What she got was $39 million in a court in Portland. This decision sent Ms. Kavage into overdrive and it didn't

take long before thousands of Scientologists descended on Portland in protest of religious freedom. Stevie Wonder even rang in and sang I called to say I love you down the phone to the crowd. Stevie! Stevie! Mate! I know, it's bad. It's real bad. They're all in it. They're everywhere.

Geez. So at this protest where Stevie Wonder is singing down the phone, John Travolta was also in attendance, which was interesting considering that two years before he had told Rolling Stone that he still believed in Scientology but that he had not been audited in one and a half years. He told the journalist quote, I've been something of an ostrich about how it's used me because I haven't investigated exactly what the organizations have done. One part of me says that if somebody gets some good out of it, then maybe it's all right. The other part of me says that I hope it uses

some taste and discretion, I wish I could defend Scientology better, but I don't think it even deserves to be defended in a sense. Oh John. Oh John. You're in trouble. Uh oh. Uh oh. Now's the time to ostrich my friend. Yeah, Ron. But in Portland, he changed his tune. He said now, quote, once in a while you have to stand up for what you believe in. And I'm here tonight, and I've had counselling. I give counselling counseling and I don't want to lose that. It sounds convincing. Sounds definitely like he's there of his own free will and hasn't been given a prompt card. Eventually the Scientologists won and the Portland case was declared a mistrial based on prejudicial arguments presented by the prosecution and those arguments were that Hubbard

was a sociopath and that Scientology is a terrorist cell Scientology settled with Christopherson out of court. We don't know how much for Meanwhile Hubbard was still out of sight and there were no clear ideas of who would take over OTs aren't supposed to get old or frail. So Hubbard, being both, was pretty bad press. And it got even worse when on the 16th of January 1986 Hubbard suffered a severe stroke and ordered a death assist from his closest aide. He didn't even ask to see any of his family. He signed a will that reduced their inheritance and left Pat and Annie in charge. Hubbard died on the 24th of January 1986 and just before he died he claimed he had been promoted to Admiral by the Galactic Confederacy and

was off to do some missions for them. That's what I want you to tell everyone when I die. Got it. Space Admiral. Excellent. On to some big missions. What so I can get section two? Good. So this left Pat, Annie, and Miss Cavvidge to come up with a plan of what to do next. Miss Cavvidge decided to tell the church that Hubbard hadn't died, but that he had dropped out of his body to move to a higher level of existence.

The passing of Hubbard was presented in the Hollywood Palladium by a grinning Miss Cavvidge in his sea-orgue uniform. Miss Cavvidge told told the two thousand there faithful that Hubbard was now investigating the next levels of OTs and quote, it is beyond anything of us had imagined. The level is in fact done in an exterior state meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body.

The body has served its purpose and in AD 36, AD being after Dianetics by the way, L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body that he had used in this lifetime for 74 years, 10 months and 11 days and then Miss Cavage points to a very large portrait of L. Ron Hubbard that's behind him with a hip hip hooray and that's echoed by everyone in the Hollywood palladium. It's the most cheesy sinister shit ever. Hey, are you at children's party? And the CEO uniform is literally like a fucking sailor. Oh, yep. It's like a Kmart Navy uniform, basically.

Oh my God. Yes. And that is where we will leave you this week with Miscavige up there, but not quite. He's still got some consolidating to do, his leadership, and we will get into that next week. Until then, please don't die because you know what OT3 is. Don't jump into the wall of fire. It's interesting though, we have Scientology in the UK and they are partially tax exempt. I don't think they've got the full shebang, but they're not. They're getting some money and there's two in London, there's like the Church of Scientology and there's the Dianetics Centre. And obviously in Hollywood, their plan is like get people who want to be actors, who want to be stars.

So they set up their centres near where those people are going to be. The Dianetics Centre in London is right next to RADA. So they're using the same tactics over here across the pond. And we will get to those tactics next week where we'll be talking about Ms. Scavige's Scientology and how it differs and the spaces in between. And we're moving on with you for part two of our series on Scientology, which will probably get us into some trouble. We're going to try our best. If it does, I feel like we'll have made it. I said it last week and I'll say it again. If we get a letter from the Church of Scientology,

I will say it again. If we get a letter from the Church of Scientology, I will frame it. Oh, I would expect nothing less. I actually think, you know, sometimes when we've covered like Saudi Arabia, we're going to cover China and Russia in upcoming episodes very soon. Are we going to get in trouble? I feel like the day we do is the day I know that we have really, really made it as a podcast. The only podcast episode that has ever got kickback from a person actually involved was several years ago actually now. Mr. Thorne. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mr. threatening us with the IRS. Okay. Well, HMRC. We pay our taxes. I will happily send you a PDF of our tax strategy.

Go check it out if you're interested. I'll leave a link in the episode description. If you aren't bored enough of your own fucking taxes, go and have a look at ours. But anyway, enough about tax. Actually, lots about tax in this week's episode. It's a very tax themed episode. Do you know at one point in my life, I was going to be a corporate tax person? I know. It's not a look. It's not a vibe. Who am I? Who am I? I don't know. Who were you then? I don't know. Who was I? Still not entirely sure. Maybe I need auditing.

Maybe I accidentally audited myself into becoming a podcaster. Quite possibly. Who knows. So last week in Scientology part one, we left you with the death of L. Ron Hubbard or as new kid on the block David Miscavige would have you believe, L. Ron Hubbard or as new kid on the block David Miscavige would have you believe L. Ron Hubbard's ascension into the next realm of research leaving his inconvenient earthly body behind. There are times when I have spent so long staring at a Google doc for an episode that I do think I have ascended into the next realm of research. Yeah, gone exterior. I have. It's all happening.

So that was last week. This week we're talking about what Scientology is like today. The history lesson is over and we're going to talk about how Scientology controls its tier two celebrities. And most importantly, we will be asking the question, where is Shelley Miscavige? I hate to say this, but I do enjoy saying the name. Miscavige. Miscavige. Yeah, it's pretty good I do enjoy saying the name. Miss Cavage. Miss Cavage. Yep.

It's pretty good. It's a good name. I wonder where it's from in the world. Do you think it's like an anglicized Polish maybe? It is because like this is off on a tangent already, but like know a lot of people who like obviously were immigrants, but you know, when they came to Ellis Island, a lot of them sort of were just like, that sounds way too fucking... Where you're from.

Yeah. Change that to this, this new one. Johnny Appleseed. Yeah, exactly. A lot of Irish people got the O's knocked off the front of their name. Sure, sure. So maybe, maybe that's what happened to the miscavages. I'll look it up. So let's remind ourselves what an absolute beast it is that we are dealing with here. In the United States alone, the tax-exempt Church of Scientology has over 400 million dollars worth of property assets. In the Caribbean, they even have a massive ship that's called the Free Winds. And none other than A-list crazy celebrity Tom Cruise has had his birthday party on it. Tom Cruise is nuts.

Yes. But we only found that out relatively recently. Like he was a superstar, like the most famous man on the planet. He's met the Dalai Lama, like he's has so much access and we only think he's bananas now because of Scientology. Can I say though, we're going to dig into it a lot in this episode, but Tom Cruise is genuinely to me terrifying. Like so, like grade A sinister. Is it because he has that one tooth that's right in the middle of his face?

Oh, I never noticed. Oh my God, look at Tom Cruise's smile now. One of his, not inside, whatever those teeth are called, your front two teeth, one of his is directly in the middle of his face. It is. Someone's even like... Yeah, it's a thing. When you Google Tom Cruise teeth, it's like they've drawn a line down the middle of his face. I think when you have the line drawn, I can notice it.

Otherwise, I can't. The sinister part of him is he genuinely feels like the character out of like American Psycho. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really, truly. And I know, you know, Christian Bale did a great job playing that character, but it should have been Tom Cruise. But we'll get on to all of my fears surrounding Tom Cruise in this week's episode.

But back to Scientology, because they also own all of the copyrights and trademarks to all of Hubbard's canon. And if you can remember, cast your mind back to last week, no one has written as many books as L. Ron Hubbard. So that means that they have all of the trademarks and copyright to over a thousand books relating to the foundations of Scientology, essentially. Not even that. Every piece of science fiction he ever wrote.

This is true, yeah. All of the made up words he copyrighted, all of it, all of it, all of it. They're even rumored to have nuclear blast resistant caverns. And in New Mexico, they also have an airstrip in the shape of two interlocking circles because you've got to keep it edgy. It has to be recognisable.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. A lot of shit looks the same from up there. This is true. And why do they have this airstrip? Why does it look so recognisable? Possibly because, you know, just in case one day very dead Elron Hubbard decides that he needs to come back, he has a place to land from his mysterious space mission.

Yeah, that he can easily recognize as his from the air. So what actually happened after Elron Hubbard left this earth one way or the other? Well, technically speaking, he left Pat and Annie Broca, his closest aides who were with him at the time of his death, in charge. And as we'll go on to see, it didn't stay that way for very long. Even though there was absolutely no mention of David Miscavige in Hubbard's final declaration. That was just a detail. It wasn't going to stop dead-eyed Dave. After Hubbard sprang into the astral plane, missionaries were sent to Scientology centers around the globe to spread the word. And that word included a message from Pat Broca. And this message was that Hubbard had already added OT levels 9 and 10 to the

Scientology path to salvation. Pat even held up a sheet of paper with a bunch of handwritten numbers on it saying that it was OT 9 and he claimed that this had come from Hubbard himself. Whether it did or not doesn't actually matter, it doesn't matter whether Hubbard hand wrote these numbers or not because what Pat Brok is doing is making himself the new channel of truth. He's the only one that has it. So he's the only one who's got the answers to the higher levels, which is of course what everyone wants. They've all been stuck on OT8 for years and that makes him very powerful and Miss Kavich did not like that one bit.

Pat Brokaw on the other hand was unsurprisingly reveling in his newfound fame, power and might. He even ordered himself a shiny new gold uniform and designed a flag to be flown at whatever Scientology residence he happened to be sleeping at that night. Like the Queen. Yes. I also feel like maybe this is me being super paranoid, but I wouldn't want to flag up showing off where I was sleeping every night. That's how you're going to get fucking murdered.

It's just like a big town I'd be like, I'm here, I'm asleep, I'm defenceless. No, no, no, don't do that. But the flag's somewhere else. False flag, literally. Quite literally a false flag. Though I can get on board with the shiny gold uniform. I do think that it was similar to the other Sea Org uniforms, which are like formal Navy, but his had, I believe, solid gold epaulettes. So he's like Sea Org, but Colonel Gaddafi style. Everyone got that picture in their head? Excellent. Let's move on. Because while we're on the subject of Scientology

residences, let's define what that means. Scientology describes these residences as comfortable seminaries or convents, which in and of itself seems like an oxymoron. I feel like the word seminary or convent sounds very uncomfortable. And basically they say that these residences are where people can be safe, they can study, they can do auditing and they can make merry. Except you're not allowed to drink the day before you do an audit, have an audit. And because everyone was basically auditing every single day, that kind of makes it seem like you don't have any time to make merry at all.

You know, I think I said this last week, I love Leah Remini. I love everything she says. She is my patron saint. She said, if you're like at a wedding, you can have one drink. But if you're auditing the next day, no. I see. And you're auditing every day. So these residences owned by Scientology are absolutely everywhere. For example, there's one in East Grimstad. It's like a big estate. John Sweeney goes there in his documentary when he's like, can I have some access please? And they're like, are you going to say the word cult? And he's like, yep. And they're like, nope. So yeah, there's one in East Grimstad. If you're near, don't go check it out. Do a drive-by.

Maybe. There's like a little like insignia on the gate. I think it might even be where Elrond Hubbard lived and he bought it from the Maharaja, I think. Wow. Illustrious pass then to that one. But if you're in California, these residences are a lot more hard to avoid, whether you want to do a drive-by or not look at them at all, because there are bloody loads of them in California. Unsurprisingly, home of the cult, state of the cult, cult state.

Or as we've called it before, God's own graveyard. So the most significant of all of these residences is one called Gold Base. And it's where Scientology houses their production company, Golden Era Productions. It's also where they make all of their propaganda films. And you can find these propaganda films on YouTube full of absolutely dead-eyed people talking about how great Miscavige is. I've watched a lot of them. And there's one that is fronted great Miscavige is. I've watched a lot of them. And there's one that is fronted by Miscavige himself, which is unusual because as we'll go on to discover,

he doesn't generally do very well on camera. And it is, he says in it something like, if you've heard anything about Scientology, not from Scientology, it's not true. And it's just the weirdest argument ever. And he is terrifying, got very into bodybuilding apparently. So apparently he's like Tonk as shit, like under his- And five foot three.

Five foot three, dead behind the eyes and a muscle machine. Wow. Maybe that's why him and Tom Cruise get on so well, it's short man syndrome. Yeah, man. Five foot three, like- That's short. I'm just shy of five foot three. Yeah. And I can confirm, ladies and gentlemen, she is tiny. Yeah. That's, but not Tonk.

Not yet. There's time. Do a trading montage. So Golden Era Productions has also started their own network of shows on YouTube, designed to show the inner workings of the sect. But as you can imagine, they are not particularly illuminating. No, it's very like, they're very slickly produced. I'll give them that. I mean, this is the Hollywood cult.

And it's very like, you can come and use our recording studios and look at this engineer who's been a Scientologist for years and look at this architect who's doing all this amazing stuff. He's a Scientologist. Oh my God, maybe we should do a Scientology. I'm putting my foot down. No Scientology. Do you know what it is? It's like what the guy who started WeWork wanted it to be. Yeah. And if you haven't yet watched the documentary, I forgot what it's called.

It's like called How to Lose $39 Billion overnight or something like that. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. And I kind of feel like genuinely that's what he wanted it to be. And he was just less successful. Well, maybe cracked it wide open. Honestly, watch the documentary. I haven't watched it, but I have listened to the Wondry series. Okay, no, that is also really good. The reason that I would also recommend the documentaries

because they do lots of kind of like David Miscavige, the guy whose name I've completely forgotten is really bad on camera. So they keep having to film him and he'll go in front of camera and he's trying to like be really rabble rousing and inspirational. And then he keeps doing like cut, start again, start again. And you can see the mask kind of slip when the cameras turned off and it's really jarring. Yeah, I bet. Jarring. So Gold Bay is where all of these YouTube videos are made.

And I can really kind of see the image of the person in the meeting who was like, we're going to do YouTube. And then they're all like, oh my God, of course. So they're making all these YouTube videos on Goldbase and Goldbase itself is in bumfuck nowhere California, north of San Jacinto. And in the Louis Theroux documentary, which is called like my Scientology movie, whatever, love Louis, it's not his best work. They just pull up the car outside of Goldbase and then get like showered out by this woman for literally no reason. She was like, this is a private road. And Louis is like, no, it's not. So, I mean, give it a watch. It will give you an idea

of just how like shuttered Scientology is Goldbase in particular. And that's actually just how they like it because a feature of Goldbase is a house called Bonnieview, which is kept in tip-top condition just in case Hubbard ever makes a triumphant return. It's very much a Jesus is coming, look busy situation. And to be asked to stay at Bonnieview is one of the utmost privileges for a Scientologist. And if you ain't been to the Oscars, it ain't gonna be you. Pat and his wife Annie were at Gold Base most of the time, it's the HQ so that makes sense, in the early days of their rule. And Pat may have been feeling himself. But the rest of the Sea Org were not. Pat was advised to lay low but he physically could not do it, which rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. And it didn't help that he just wasn't a very good leader.

He wasn't charismatic. He was bumbling and inarticulate. Bit of a Boris Johnson vibe, I think. But in a, I think Boris Johnson's is a facade to make you trust him. I think Pat genuinely is just not that smart. Yeah. Which is probably why Hubbard kept him so close

because he was never a real threat. He was never gonna usurp him. Annie, on the other hand, people generally liked her. They held her in a little bit higher esteem than they did Pat, but that was not going to save Pat from the snapping jaws of David Miscavige. The Church of Scientology had big problems and Pat just wasn't up to the task. The biggest problem was a financial one. The organisation had lost its hallowed tax exemption in 1967 because they were assessed to be a commercial enterprise and not a religion. On top of that, Hubbard, in his infinite wisdom, hadn't paid a penny of tax since 1973, which meant that the Church of Scientology was one1 billion, that's billion with a B,

in tax arrears. And they only had $125 million in reserves. So some very quick math will teach you that they are, in fact, in deep shit. And so of course that spells only one thing for most organizations, bankruptcy. But we aren't dealing with just any old organization today. And so Scientology took another route. They decided to wage war with the IRS instead, with Miscavige at the helm. In 1987, Miscavige became the chairman of the board. The only thing keeping Pat Broca in the picture was that only he had the new OT levels, also he said.

Searching for these mystical texts, Miscavige seized all of Pat's documents, arguing that he needed them for the tax exemption case. Essentially, his argument was, we're never going to get religion status if there are things about the religion that I don't know. I'm not going to be able to make the case to the IRS that we are a religion if there's a secret that I don't have. That's how he argues it. But he never finds OT9 into OT10, probably because Pat had made them up. Miss Cavidge did find in all of his document rifling that there was a further $1.8 million within the Scientology ledger that couldn't be accounted for, which when you're under

investigation by Inland Revenue is less than ideal. The pressure was just too much for Patty. He had IRS on one side, David Miscavige on the other and he was like, fuck this, I'm out. He blew. That's the Scientology term for leaving. And he fled the country actually and he was followed everywhere by Miscavige's goons. Annie, his wife, stayed on at Sea Org but she was sent to a re-education camp for years. Eventually she was invited back to Grace at Gold Base, but many suspect that the reason Miss Carvage let Annie come back was because if Pat resurfaced, she could handle him. As far as we know, Pat never came back, he never reappeared, and Annie died of lung cancer in 2011.

So with the brokers now out of his way, David Miscavige's position as head of the church was secured. Miscavige then launched a tirade of lawsuits against the IRS. And in case it isn't clear, what the Church of Scientology want from the IRS is, of course, certified religion status because religions don't pay tax. That's all it is. I truly believe that if it wasn't for the tax dodge, they wouldn't give a shit about being a religion. No, no, no, no, no, no. I think it's much more akin, again, to come back to the WeWork comparison,

I think it's much more akin to being like almost like this weird lifestyle organization where you're networking with these people. It's no riff-raff, but the riff-raff are there because they've got to be the base of the pyramid. It's kind of like a weird MLM Ponzi scheme mixed with a networking club, mixed with something like the Freemasons. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty spot on. And like, you're absolutely right. They wouldn't, I don't think, care about the religion side if it wasn't for the tax, except

I guess they go on about the spirituality side, but then they're more science, quote unquote, science. Yeah. I think they push the spirituality stuff because they want that sweet sweet tax dodge. I think that's why they lean so heavily on that. But do you think the spirituality side and the engrams and the trauma and the blah blah blah auditing, that's what brings the proles in? I mean, sure. But that's what Tony Robbins says. He's not religion. Yeah, that's true. That's true. It's like, yeah, it's like souped up self-help. Spot on.

And so it was during this campaign of trying to move Scientology from being seen as a commercial enterprise into a religion that David Miscavige came up with the Scientology Cross that can be seen on all of their buildings. And it is also when the Sea Org started to wear more religion-y clothes. They wear like, like priest dog collars for a bit. Like it's very, it's really like optically, we are a religion. That's because the Scientology Cross is like essentially it's just a crucifix with some extra spikes on it. So they're like, what do people recognize as a religious

symbol? Okay, a crucifix, but spike it. The tax man was not the only enemy Scientology was fighting. The eighties were a publicity nightmare for Miscavige and his followers. So Miscavige hired PR firm Hill and Nolton, who have represented military dictators and arms dealers. They're also the bastards who sold the Gulf War to the American people. Hill and Nolton, do not fuck about. But even still, come 1991, with the Church of Scientology,

they had their work cut out for them. Time Magazine had run a cover story called Scientology, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power. Time magazine had run a cover story called Scientology, the thriving cult of greed and power. And this story referred to L. Ron Hubbard as quote, part storyteller, part flim flam man. The internet says that flim is like an old Nordic Scandinavian word that means like mockery. But my best friend is Swedish. I asked her and she was like, I've never heard that word in my life. So yeah, no idea. I think it's probably just that it kind of just sounds like what it is. A flimflam man.

A flimflam man. Yeah, true. If you know, please do get in touch. This time article was the first source that we know of where doubts were cast over John Travolta's sexuality. And it was also the first place that it was implied that Scientology was holding Travolta essentially hostage under threat of releasing his homosexual exploits to the press. That's a rumor that everyone has heard. Everyone has heard that John Travolta is actually gay and Scientology have got him by the throat because they're threatening to tell everyone that he's actually been gay this whole time and he'll never work again.

I don't know, obviously, I don't know John Travolta personally. He's quite old now. You'd think, you know, but Leah Remini says that the reason that people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta stay in the church is not because they have shit on them. It's because their lives are fucking great and they get everything they want. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is a little bit of a sidetrack, but while we're on the subject of John Travolta, have you ever seen the terrible movie Battlefield Earth? No. No, I do not recommend.

The Battlefield Earth is basically a, I guess I have to call it a sci-fi film. Right? We have to call it a sci-fi film. Okay. Begrudgingly. Begrudgingly. But basically there are, I don't even know if rumours is the right word. I feel like it's quite an open secret.

Battlefield Earth is basically based on some of the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. They obviously, Scientology can fund it. They can push it through. John Travolta stars in it. A lot of people watch it. It's essentially meant to be kind of like propaganda. Okay. Like Dean Cain, who used to be Superman doing those anti-abortion super Christian films. Yeah, exactly. But they don't directly reference Scientology in it, but it's essentially meant to be written on the law of Scientology. Right. Also a lot of people say the same thing about Will Smith's movie that came out a few years

ago. What was it called? Oh God, it was the one with Jaden Smith in it as well. Oh, I know what you mean. After Earth. After mean. After Earth, which I've also seen trashed in the reviewers and by my favorite YouTube movie reviewers who called it After Birth. That's hysterical. It's terrible. Don't watch it. But again, more alleged rumors that it's kind of like

Scientology propaganda. Right. OK. I mean, they've got the money. They've got the studios. They've got the stars. they've got the studios, they've got the stars, they've got the sound stages, they've got literally more cameras than you can shake a stick at. Exactly. What they don't have is an understanding of the way the world works. So in response to this Time Magazine article, David Miscavige was obviously furious and

he decides that he's going to take the stand, So in response to this article, David Miscavige went on nightline to defend his faith. He just made it much, much worse. In the months before his live slot on the 14th of February, 1992, Miscavige practiced four hours a day. So he's got his cronies around him and he makes them ask him really difficult questions and he practices and does it four hours a day for months. And when the time came, a 15 minute report was shown before Mis. Kavage's interview. And this report is what we've all come to associate with Scientology, very standard stuff detailing all of the stalking they do, the tire slashing, the phone tapping, the

family destroying, all of the antics that Scientology has been doing for years. Not a great prelude for him. No, but very, very good TV production. 100% and very necessary. But I'm guessing he wasn't expecting that when he's doing his four hour rehearsals every single day. I don't know what he was expecting. And I think maybe we can be generous and say that's what threw him off.

But we also know he's just not very good in front of camera. Yeah. However, he felt David Miscavige remained calm during his interview. And he told the interviewer and the cameras, because he does like the looking at the camera situation, that all of the people who had been featured in the report that they had just played before he came on,

were members of the hate group, the cult awareness network. Yeah, sure. And if you think that's awkward and cringe-worthy and toe-curling and stomach-churning enough, he goes on to say something much worse. Because he goes on to say, this hate group, the cult awareness network, it's the same as the KKK would be with the blacks.

In this situation, just in case you missed the analogy, Scientology is the blacks. In this situation, just in case you missed the analogy, Scientology is the blacks. It's a fundamentally flawed argument because I mean, it's an outrageous comparison for a start. But the KKK hate black people because they are black people. So he's essentially saying the cult awareness network hate me because I'm a cult. Like it makes no sense. I mean, it makes perfect sense, but it completely undermines what he's trying to say. Yeah, like it's a poor debating tactic from him. He's really

shot himself in the foot. You don't need us to pick apart why that's a terrible comparison. So let's move on. He also went on to say that the only people that were getting harassed was him and the church, like in the world. So they're saying, because they're talking about all the people that they stalk and the families that they're just there. And he's like, no, I'm the real victim. All of these people are liars. I'm the one. We're the victim.

We're the victim. Crucified. Yeah. Got it. Got it. And when asked why Scientology have to pour so much money into their faith, Ms. Gavage answered, the Scientology is the biggest social reform group in the world. So if people stay with Scientology long enough, they will become so successful and have so much

money themselves, that giving back to the church will be of little consequence to them. So it's an investment. It's an investment. He's comparing it to like going to a super prestigious university, almost like. Yeah, or like a public speaking course. It's like you're investing in your future career because you'll be good at this thing. But the this thing they're saying they're going to make you good at is life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, obviously our alumni give us loads of money because they're so successful and they have loads of money. It's a win-win. Because we made them successful.

Exactly. He also added that the writers of the time article, the one that we referenced earlier, calling them a greedy fucking cult. He said that these writers had been paid off by the makers of the drug Prozac because Scientology had lost them so many customers and so much money. Yeah. It's a hit job. It's a Prozac hit job. Yeah, exactly.

Scientologists, because of Hubbard and blah blah blah, it's a big, they actually have an exhibit on Sunset that's called Psychiatry, like Cult of Death or something. And their argument is that they're just keeping people in chemical prisons and not solving the underlying problem, which of course you can solve with auditing. So Prozac if you don't know I can't imagine how you don't know but if you don't know Prozac is a like a trade name for fluoxetine, which is an SSRI which is like I would say probably the most prescribed SSRI It's an antidepressant very very common. A lot of people take it. So what he's saying is That Prozac hate him so much because he has closed their gap in the market

because no one's depressed anymore. It was a shit show. It was an absolute disaster. David Miscavige never went on TV again. He has made little appearances on YouTube, but nothing, nothing like Nightline. But that episode of Nightline actually won an Emmy and Miscavige had a copy made to keep in his office at Gold Base. Of course David Miss Cavidge wasn't running the show entirely on his own. It's now time to meet Mark Marty Rathbun. He was amongst the highest ranking Scientologists during the 80s and 90s. His official title was Inspector General like he's doing the fucking Spanish Inquisition or some shit and he was in charge of all of the trademarks and the copyrights which made him an

integral part of the war against the IRS and all of the lawsuits that Scientology filed endlessly and I'm sure that they still do Marty's just not involved anymore. Fun fact about Rathbun is that his granddad was the illustrator who drew Archimima the Quaker Oats man and the Coca-Cola Father Christmas. Oh that's fun. That is fun isn't it? Less fun is that his mom and his brother had significant mental health problems. I think his mom actually drove herself into San Francisco Bay in a suicide. It was really, really awful. And his brother was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and he felt that his brother was just being chemically held in this straight jacket and no one was actually helping

him. So he goes off traveling to learn about Eastern mysticism and how to help his brother and then he comes across Scientology. And it was a bit of a marriage made in heaven for him because it was all of this like mysticism and science and also we hate psychiatry too. So Marty joined the Sea Org in 1978 because he wanted to become a great auditor because he wanted to help his brother. But he ended up working in LA with Miss Cavich. Today Rathbun is actually a vocal critic of Scientology and speaks very openly about his role in the war against the taxman. He's confirmed that the aim was never to win anything, only to harass and discourage.

Which is what they do with everything. Their aim is never to win. It's stop you trying. That's what they do with everything. Journalists, tax people, people who leave. They want to make your life so miserable that you'll be like, it's not worth it. But that is almost the fundamental tactic of anybody who is just simply trying to dominate, but they don't have, and they know they don't have a solid winnable argument. So they're like, I'm just going to make you hate yourself. I'm just going to make you not even try.

And I'm going to make you terrified to try. And I'm going to make an example of you. So his tactic, Rathbun, was never to defend, only to attack. So they're never defending their sort of stance. It's just to attack anybody who opposes them. And apparently Rathbun took his lead from Hubbard himself, who wrote the following. Quote, start feeding lurid blood, sex, crime, actual evidence on the attackers in the press, make it rough.

There has never been an attacker who was not reeking with crime. All we had to do was look for it and murder would come out. I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but you get the vibe. You get the vibe of what he's saying and this idea makes perfect sense to a Scientologist even if it doesn't make any sense to you. Anyone attacking the doctrine was a bad person low on the tone scale that we talked about last week and so it followed that they just must have done some bad things. If they were good people, then they would be Scientologists. And Marty ran with this idea to the end of the earth.

It's pretty ingenious actually. It feels very, very tried, tested, true trodden. Like this idea of just removing all critical thinking, putting people into groups of bad people, good people, black and white, they have a different opinion, they disagree with you, therefore they are bad people, they are fundamentally immoral people, and then you can say, do think whatever you want about them. It's classic, it's as old as humanity itself. And anybody who thinks they've evolved past that, I would argue that the current culture wars is fundamentally rooted in this basis.

But mudslinging and skeleton-filled closet exploring would only take Scientology so far because you need positivity as well or you're not going to attract anyone. This is true. This is true. You can't be all doom and gloom because if you are all doom and gloom, you will attract people but you'll attract very nihilistic people who aren't necessarily possibly going to be the most motivated people on the planet in terms of making money. Oh yeah and they were struggling to make money because after Nightline and the Time article it was actually considered pretty embarrassing to be a Scientologist. They needed to turn that car around and that my friends is where Tom Cruise comes in.

Oh god. This is where it really takes a turn. But it's also the part where you feel like they're really, really leaning into the genius quote unquote of it. I actually have learned quite a lot about Tom Cruise. Same. I'm going to say I know, and this is by choice, next to nothing about celebrities. And so this has been a real eye opener reading this script. I love those tweets like everything I've learned about the relationship between Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly,

I learned against my will. I feel like I accidentally learned things against my will just by going on social media. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Please stop showing me. Well, I'm sorry, because I'm going to have to tell you about Tom Cruise. This I want to know. Okay. Because it is pertinent to the case.

Mr. Cruise, as he's known by me, was actually raised a Catholic. And he actually did a year in seminary, which is where it's like priest school. Seven years in seminary is what you have to do to be a priest. Seven years. Oh, yeah. It's like being a vet. You become a fucking doctor in that time or a vet or an architect. Yeah. Well, the Catholic church would argue that being a priest is like being a doctor for the soul. But seminary, he decided it wasn't for him yet. And he took himself off to Hollywood to become a star. His name isn't Tom Cruise. His name is Thomas Mappathathaforth. No.

Yes, it is. Yes, it is, I'm afraid. Oh, God. Oh, man. Americans, stop with the thirds and the fourths, man. Just give your children their own names. It didn't take Tom very long in Hollywood after he changed his name from Muppet of the fourth to land his first role in a film with Calvin Klein favourite, Brooke Shields. That film was called Endless Love. Though I do have to say quickly picking up on the names of celebrities, I've said this before I don't know if it was on under the duvet and not on a main feed. My favourite

one is still that guy who is the lead character who plays the sheriff in The Walking Dead. And he's British and he's obviously playing an American character in that. His name is like Clutterbatch, his surname, and he changed it to Lincoln to make it in Hollywood. I mean, he did. He did. It worked. Well done. My favorite one is that Hugh Grant's middle name is Mungo. So he's Hugh Mungo Grant. It's baby Hugh Mungo. I mean, only posh people can get away with shit like that. They knew what they were doing, right? I mean, you weren't like accidentally give your child the middle name Mungo and the first name Hugh. Oh God. Anyway, Tom, Mr. Cruz was introduced to Scientology before the Nightline extravaganza, before everything was embarrassing. He was introduced to it in 1986 by his first wife, Mimi Rogers, just after he'd wrapped on Top Gun. If you

don't know, that was the biggest film on the planet. He was a superstar. You did not get bigger than Tom Cruise in 86. In his early days with Scientology affiliation, he was very vocal about the church, claiming that auditing had cured his dyslexia, but him and his wife were secretly always seen as a potential trouble source by the church. Because Mimi Rogers, Z's parents, were what's called squirrels. Squirrels is an Elrond Hubbard term, therefore a Scientology term, for people who turn their back on the church but continue to practice Scientology doctrine, ideology and crucially auditing. And they are kind of the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low, and because Mimi's parents were them, they always had one eye on her. In 1989, Tom Cruise met David Miscavige at Gold Base and

he just decided he was over Mimi. He'd finished, done, because he just so happened to see Nicole Kidman in a film and decided he wanted a piece of that. So that meant Scientology wanted Mimi out because of her parents and Tom wanted her out because he didn't want her anymore and they managed between them to get her out and the way they did this they do this a lot with couples that they want to break up. They brought Cruz and Rogers into a room and they're sitting opposite each other doing this like confrontational auditing session where they have to confess their sins to their partner in front of other people. We don't know what was said, but they get divorced.

I feel like that would be the natural conclusion to that situation. Yeah. Can you just awful, awful, awful, awful. Mimi later told Playboy that Cruz was seriously considering becoming a monk and he felt that he needed to remain celibate to maintain, and this is a quote my friends, this is some American psycho shit, the purity of his instrument. Okay. It's bad stuff, it's real bad. Yeah. So with Mimi Out The Way doing interviews with Playboy, Cruz cracked on with Nicole

Kidman and Scientology gave them a fairy tale existence. They were quite literally given whatever they wanted. The sea orc even planted a field of wildflowers so Kidman and Cruz could run through it together and frolic. Great for the biodiversity of the area, but what's happening? In return for these wildflowers, the mansions, the parties, the cars, the motorbikes, Cruz blasted that he was a Scientologist at every opportunity, and he quickly climbed all the way up that bridge and was at OT3, the wall of fire, in no time. Kidman never made it past OT2, which is quite unusual. Usually people are just like gagging

to get to OT3. Especially because she's got the husband who actually, I don't know if they're married, but whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know they're married, but whatever, she's got the partner, she's got the money, she's well into it. So it is interesting that she stays at OT2. Yeah. So she just sort of plateaus on OT2 for a while. And within the church, it was suspected by the high rankers that that was because Nicole Kidman's father is a prominent psychiatrist. So therefore an SP is a suppressive person and he probably stopped her from climbing the bridge. Or maybe she was just busy.

I feel like she's probably starting to see through it. I mean, I can't remember when they shot Eyes Wide Shut, but it's during this period of time where Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman shoot Eyes Wide Shut. So they are away doing their jobs sometimes. So this takes us up to the mid-90s and a victory for Miscavige. In October 1993, Miscavige announced to 10,000 of his disciples in a sports arena in LA that, quote, the war is over. The future is ours. And he's kind of not wrong. No, he's not. Because very famously after the mid-90s,

Scientology continued to grow and get richer. Yes, we are out of the mid-90s and they're still around. So what's he talking about? What is he saying when he's talking about the war being over? Well, the IRS and the Church of Scientology had come to an agreement. Which was this. The tax gods let the $1 billion in owed tax arrears go. How they managed that is absolutely beyond me.

Is it because money is a social construct? Is it because the economy is not real? Yeah, did you not know that you can just write down on a piece of paper money and then you can get stuff with it? Good. She's literally simmering with rage. Oh my god, I'll social construct you all. Stop. So basically, yeah, the IRS let the billion dollars in owed taxes go and the church paid 12.5 million instead, which you don't have to be a genius at maths to know that is quite

considerably less than a billion. It's not the same. No, it's definitely not equal to. But sometimes things can be two things, but not this time. But not this case. So they paid the 12.5 million instead and abandoned all of their lawsuits against the IRS. And the real cherry on the whole tax evasion Sunday was that the Inland Revenue Service

signed that the Church of Scientology and all of its 150 entities in the United States to full tax exemption. And this also covered all future branches that they would choose to open. It's literally like the Inland Revenue saying, you know that thing that you really like, would you like infinite money? Would you like infinite money that nobody can ever take away from you for the rest of eternity? Is that what you would like? Because there you go. I do not know how they managed to do this. I know they're constantly suing them, there's lawsuits, etc. But it's the Inland Revenue. It's not like they've got a reputation to

uphold. You know what I mean? Like it's an institution that is immovable. It doesn't matter. It's not like they can be affected by PR. They have government coffers to be able to continue to fight lawsuits. What is the reason that they allow Scientology to have tax exempt status is really bizarre to me. Unless the reason was that the government intervened because Scientology is kicking up a fuss saying that their religious freedoms are being encroached upon or whatever. Well, I think that's it. I think the fundamental problem that the IRS kept banging their head against is define religion, define cult. What is the difference? And there is no written

down anywhere and there's no stone tablet upon which is like this is what a cult is and this is what religion is because the fact is they are a very similar things you know and we as a western society have decided what we think a cult is and it usually is that the leader is alive. Yeah and I guess it's also you know if we take it a step further and talking about cult formation it's like absolute control of all information, absolute control of everything. You can't live outside of that, which I would argue that as much as I have disdain for religion or a lack of interest in religion insofar as being involved in one, I would say you can obviously be a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, and still look at other news

sources and be able to live in the in the real world. You know, very few mainstream religious denominations are going to control you to that extent. But yeah, I get when you get into a legal sense, it will become much more tricky rather than a social or cultural sense. It's very difficult to prove legally. And that's why the IRS got themselves in a big old knot. And obviously America's big thing is religious freedom. Yep, except from when it comes to the Satanic temple.

So just months after this, the war is over announcement, Marty Rathburn blew. They're just blowing all over the place. There's a lot of people blowing, yeah. He had been in the trenches with the tax man for years and Miss Cavage had treated him like a piece of human shit. Rathburn only put up with it, he says, because he really believed in the cause. For him, he was doing it for Hubbard. Right. And he's like, I can take it because I'm doing the right thing because he really believes in it. Right. Because he had saved his brother.

Like he really, really believes in it. And that's the thing about Scientology. A lot of people really, really believe in it. Yeah. I feel like, and this is coming back to the whole pyramid scheme shape, I feel like the non celebrities really believe in it. I don't believe that the celebrities believe in it. I feel like, and maybe this is me giving them too much credit. I'm not saying it's because they're so smart. I feel like they're like, this is a great networking opportunity and it's a great power consolidation organization. I want to sit next to Will Smith, please. Exactly. But Marty had had enough. He'd done his job. He'd got the tax exemption. That was his task. He

completed it. And he said to himself, I'm not going to be this guy's bitch for the rest of my life. And that is a direct quote. So he broke his billion year contract and he left. Miss Cavidge rang him to apologize and talk about all the pressure he was under, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Rathbun agreed to meet with Miss Cavidge to marry her to New Orleans. The glamour. Rathbun was asked to return, which if he accepted, he would be given an award, which I don't know what the term is, but it's like a made up Elrond Hubbard word for like valuable team member or like productive member of the service, whatever. Come back, come back and we'll make you employee of the month.

Yeah, quite literally that. And I think there was only ever one other person who was given this award and it was given to her after her death. It's a Scientology big deal. And also Rathbun was told that if he came back, accepted this award that he would be fast tracked to OT3. And that was an offer that Marty Rathbun, true believer in the magic of Dianetics, could not refuse. He was aboard the Free Winds for two years getting to OT3 and when he returned to Gold Base enlightened with the story of Zeno in the Galactic Federation, Ms. Carriage told Rathbun that the two years that he had been gone were the best of his life. He's like, I'm so much more productive

without you blah blah blah blah blah I don't have you holding me back. Like I've discovered that you're the biggest SP in the world, et cetera. So Miss Carriage declared Marty Rathbun an SP publicly. And so Rathbun, formerly Top Brass, was sent to Clearwater, Florida, immediately after he had got to OT3. And he was sent to Clearwater as a trainee to start all over again. Oh my God. That's how you break a person. to Clearwater as a trainee to start all over again. Oh my god. That's how you break a person. Yeah, yeah, you're right. That's exactly it.

So that wasn't the only thing going on in Clearwater. On the 5th of December 1995, Lisa MacPherson, a Scientologist undergoing training at the Fort Harrison Hotel, died. So if you remember from last week, the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida is where Hubbard set up shop after it became very obvious that he couldn't live at sea anymore because he's like in ill health and it just wasn't feasible. So he buys the Fort Harrison Hotel, sets it up.

You'll hear Scientologists talk about Clearwater all the time. It's where you go to either study super hard or you go there to be punished. I will say before we get into the Lisa MacPherson story, I know she is not the only person who has died at the Fort Harrison. She is the most widely discussed and that's why we're featuring her, but nine other people have died under mysterious circumstances at Fort Harrison. So in the weeks prior to her death, Lisa McPherson was clearly in need of help. She drove her

car into the back of a boat and when the paramedics arrived, she took all of her clothes off and wandered naked down the street. LES? That's not a healthy, happy person, I would argue. LES? No, no, it's not a very clear sign that everything is tickety-boo. So Lisa was taken to a nearby hospital. Hours later, she was taken by 10 Scientologists to room 174 of the Fort Harrison Hotel. So obviously she's taken to the hospital because the paramedics are there. The Scientologist is like, ah, ah, ah, come get her. Take her back to Fort Harrison Hotel.

Don't need these nasty doctors. Nope. And it was in this room that she was guarded night and day. And guarded makes it sound like she was being protected from somebody. You need to think about it. She was kept in there locked up. Oh, yeah. And watched night and day. They were keeping her away from anyone who might report it.

Yeah. So Lisa had been declared clear by Ms. Cavage himself and clear people, as you can probably remember from last week's episode, are supposed to have no mental health issues whatsoever, let alone a full on public breakdown. So Scientology had some quite significant explaining to do. It doesn't look very good. It looks like the worst thing that could possibly happen. Yeah. Because Ms. Cavage himself says that Lisa is clear and then she's taking our clothes

off and running around naked in the street. Yeah, publicly extremely humiliating. So after Lisa was declared clear, she had been put through an interspection rundown at the Fort Harrison Hotel and it ruined her. Introspection rundown, if you remember from last week, it's based on when Hubbard would literally keep people in the hottest parts of the Apollo on the ship and like they couldn't speak to anyone, they're fed like out of a bucket, blah, blah, blah. So it's supposed to be this like, you know, there's really obnoxious people who go on silent retreats. It's like that, but enforced upon you. And she did not take it well.

Emma Thornberry No, I think not taking it well is a very mild way to explain what happened because during her introspection rundown, Lisa stopped eating, she began bashing her head repeatedly against the wall, and she spoke in gibberish most of the time. There were several unsuccessful attempts to force feed Lisa, but eventually she slipped into a coma and died. And when she died, she was driven past five nearby hospitals because the Sea Org wanted to take her to a doctor affiliated with the Church of Scientology. It's like now how the Mormons, for example, if there is child sexual abuse going on, you get given a hotline number to call. If you say you're a mother, you suspect

that your child has been sexually abused by somebody within the church, you go and report it to an elder, they give you a hotline number to call. You call that hotline number, it goes to a lawyer who is a Mormon, who is affiliated with the church. It's so, it's so obvious. Yeah. And it's like the Hasidic jurist communities who have their own police and their own ambulances and are just completely separate. I don't really know what they thought this Scientology doctor was going to do. He wasn't going to bring her back from the dead. This is the thing. Yeah. You have to remember that they take her to him once she's dead. Which quite famously is too late. Lisa's body gets taken off to a medical examiner and that

medical examiner said the body of Lisa MacPherson was the worst case of dehydration that they had ever seen. She had not taken on any liquids at all for about a week before she died. And what's even sadder than that is that Lisa MacPherson had spent $176,700 on Scientology in just five years and she had died with $11 in her bank account. It was concluded post-mortem that there was no way that Lisa's death had been sudden and unexpected, which was what the church were claiming. The death of Lisa MacPherson was slow, drawn out, excruciating and totally avoidable.

Marty Rathbone was brought out of exile to clean up the mess. The Sea Org told the police that they had no idea what had happened. There was nothing special or different about Lisa McPherson's stay at the Fort Harrison. But in reality, there were detailed logs about Lisa and her erratic behavior that were all destroyed on the command of Marty Rathbone. The state of Florida filed criminal charges against Scientology, but nothing came of it. This particular problem cost Scientology $30 million to erase. And the guy who was doing all of the public talking and taking all the flak after Ms. Kavage took a step out of the limelight was Scientology's executive director of its Office of Special Affairs, a man

named Mike Rinder. Nowadays you can see and hear Mike alongside Leah Remini in their TV series and now podcast series, Scientology and the Aftermath. Like his former colleague Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder is now an outspoken critic of Scientology. I think one of the most striking things about Mike Rinder is when he's in Scientology he is like haggard, gaunt, like just looks so unhealthy. And then when he leaves, he puts on all of this weight and he just looks like a normal person. I'm not saying like, oh, he really let himself go, like he genuinely looks healthy. And it is such a like, let me see if I can find you a picture of the before and after because it's really quite something. So that's what he looks like when he's in, like grey, not well. This is him now.

He looks like a completely different person. Totally different person. He looks like a ghost in the first picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can tell that like, A, this is a man under an enormous amount of stress and is just not well. Yeah, I mean, if you are the public face of issues occurring at Scientology, you're going to end up with quite ghost-like aesthetic. Yeah, and he certainly did.

Rinder, and this is quite something, actually became a Scientologist at just five years old. He had even spent years aboard the Apollo with Hubbard. He was the most devout person you could ever hope to meet. He went to bat for the church publicly and often. But the Macpherson affair was too much for him to handle. According to Rinder and a few other witnesses, his punishment for not making it all magically go away overnight, you know, after they locked up a woman who was clearly in the midst of a mental health crisis who dies because she doesn't have

access to any healthcare or any medical support, because he isn't able to just instantly solve this problem, he was beaten up by dead-eye Dave and slammed into a tree on gold base. Management. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. There's so many stories of Miss Cavage beating people up, you just can't include them all.

But I think what's so significant about that one is Mike Rinder is the public face of Scientology and Miss Cavage has no problem giving you a black eye. It's shocking because you obviously hear all the time about like these sort of more advanced cults, right? The ones that aren't still like living on a secret commune somewhere. Like these guys are out in the open. The physical abuse is one of the more shocking things. Everything else is to be expected.

This is truly, truly shocking. And Mike Grinders-Penance didn't stop there with the whole being beaten up and thrown into a tree, he was required to write a public letter declaring himself to be an SP. And then he was sent to the hole. Just putting this in here, Thor, ass covering reasons, the Church of Scientology denies everything

you're about to hear. One of the things I love about Leah Remini, and yes, this is a Leah Remini stand podcast from now on, is in interviews, she's like, well, pisses me off is when the press are like, oh, alleges Remini, or Leah Remini stan podcast from now on, is in interviews she's like what pisses me off is when the press are like oh alleges Remini or Leah Remini accuses, she's like I'm not alleging anything it's fucking true. But you know I'm not Leah Remini, wish I was, if anyone wants to make like a patron saint pendant with Leah Remini on it I will wear it until I die. So just bear that in

mind but they deny all of this And you would if this was said about you. The hole, according to Rinder and many other ex-members of the Sea Org, is two double-wide trailers connected together on gold base. Inside the hole there are tables and there are chairs and not much else. There's no electricity and there's no air conditioning and let's remind ourselves that gold base is in the desert. Those who are sent to the hole are fed reheated slop and showered, with a hose, in groups. And these are high-ranking people. It's not like grunts that get sent to the hole, it's

officers. And there have been as many as 50 people living in two double-wide trailers at once. On one occasion, high-ranking officers, including Mike Rinder, were sent to the hole to rearrange the org board, which is essentially a Scientology jargon for a cabinet reshuffle. All of the officers were told they were not going to be allowed to leave the hole until they had rearranged the management of the sea org to Miss Cavage's satisfaction. Rinder was in there for two years. In this double wide? Yep.

Which I know in the past we've not known what that means. But we now know. We now know. Because it's a growth mentality and we learn. It is. Two years. Two years. Rinder was in there for two years. And he was called by Miss Cabbage and his buddies, the King of the Pie Faces. I included this to give you a window into how ridiculously

juvenile some of it is. So if you're in the hole, you're a pie face, apparently. And Rinda being the highest ranking was the King of the Pie Faces, but he was also just an SP, so don't worry about him. So everyone joins in because they don't want to be a pie face. Yeah. Schoolyard stuff, man. Like real playground shit. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of playground shit, we're about to descend even lower than that into play group shit. Because the most famous and haunting example of psychological torture that went

on in the hole was a game of musical chairs. Miss Cavage followed by his silent enforcer Marty Rathbun descended on his officers and would demand that they all play the children's game to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody on a loop. It's a good song but I don't want to listen to it for hours on end. No and I don't want to be an adult who's locked in a trailer being fed slop having to play musical chairs. Well, tough shit because that's what you're getting for your birthday. Oh no!

So the Sea Org executives would punch and push each other to get to the lessening number of chairs. Clothes and chairs were apparently ripped apart because the players were told that the losers of the game would be reassigned to undesirable posts in different countries and that they would be separated from their children and their spouses. So short of death and continued torture, the stakes are pretty high. Extremely high, yeah. This game went on until 4am and a woman called Lisa Schroer came out on

top. But it didn't really matter though because the next morning nothing happened at all. No one was sent overseas and no one was ripped from the arms of their partner. How humiliated would you be if you were Lisa and you were like, I punched people in the face for this and it wasn't real. But that's almost the power trip, isn't it? Because you'd be like, why don't they just send somebody somewhere because next time they're going to not believe that something bad is going to happen. I think the reason is the humiliation and the feeling of look at what that person was willing to do in order to fuck you all over. You can't trust her, you can't trust each other. True, true.

You can only follow what we tell you. Divide and conquer. Because if they had actually sent people off, then it would have justified Lisa's behaviour. So life after musical chairs returned to normal. Normal for gold base, that is. Which included security fences, armed guards, snipers, spikes and security cameras. Oh, and another rather grim, I can't say fact, but a statement, figure that comes out of Goldbase is that apparently 60 to 80% of women on Goldbase had abortions. Which if that is your choice, f**kin great.

That's not what we're saying here. That's not what we're saying and that's not what we think is happening. No. So again, we've got to say allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, this is what happened. It basically sounds like these abortions were forced abortions like we talked about. Again, allegedly. So as you can imagine, it is quite hard to leave Goldbase, to leave Scientology, to get out of this situation that you've unfortunately found yourself embroiled in. And many executives have lived exclusively on the base for decades. If you want to leave Scientology on the outside of gold base, bad things can happen too. Let's

talk about what's termed as the disconnect. This has happened to so many people that picking one story to tell as an example feels a little bit reductive So just so you know, this is what the pattern is and it has happened literally thousands of times So let's say your whole family is in Scientology and you decide to leave Your entire family be it your mom your dad your cousins or even your own children Will be told by the Church of Scientology that you are an SP and they are instructed to cut all contact with you Scientology that you are an SP and they are instructed to cut all contact with you. Your family will be told that any contact with you at all is harmful to their spiritual and physical health and in some cases your family will even write you letters to tell you what a horrible piece of shit you are and that they never want to hear from you again. One example of this again

Leah Remini, can I stop? Nope. Leah Remini said she was at a party at I think Chelsea Handler's house, but I can't remember. And Laura Prypon's there before she leaves Scientology. And Laura Prypon quite literally ran away from Leah Remini because she really, really believed that if she was anywhere near her, she would get ill. Yeah. Moral tarnishing by association. Again, very common tactics. But it's not even moral. It is moral, but it's spiritual and physical. They're like, you will get pneumonia, you will become physically ill. Wow.

So this behavior, this kind of mentality is the stepping stone to the famous fair game initiative that we touched on last week when we learned about Paulette Cooper and Operation Freakout. The fair game law actually predated the persecution of Paulette Cooper, because remember we said she was kind of the first person we thought had been sort of very publicly fair gamed, but it does go back before Paulette. It was written by Hubbard in 1965 as an explanation on how to deal with SPs. Hubbard wrote, quote, A truly suppressive person or group has no rights of any kind. Such enemies may be tricked, lied to or destroyed. It does seem as though a fair game is reserved for those that are either famous in the first place, those who were very high ranking, or those from outside of the church with high profiles

that critique Scientology. So it's kind of not the sort of the tool used for the prole within Scientology. No, I think the key thing is the redistribution of scarce resources. So fair gaming, they love doing it, but it is a lot of work. So if you're gonna get fair gamed,

you have to have a high profile about you. They're not going to do it if nobody knows who you are. Absolutely. And again, it's to make an example of you. And it only works if you've got a high enough profile to be made an example. Otherwise, I'd be like, why are they making an example of Fred Smith?

Like, who's this guy? So a perfect example of someone who was fair gamed is, of course, our old friend Mike Grindr, who has a whole hate website entitled whoismikegrinder.com. You can go and look at it. I've actually linked it in the show notes. This is their first thing that they do. If you piss Scientology off and you are a high enough profile person, you will have one of those websites up about you in hours. So yeah, of course this website is maintained by the Church of Scientology and the first

thing on this website is a video of Mike's son who still lives in Clearwater, Florida. If that doesn't explain it enough for you, if you live in Clearwater, you are a Scientologist, why else would you live there? And in this video, Mike's son can be seen telling the cameras about how his dad was never there for him, even when he was diagnosed with cancer. Which I would argue. I mean, obviously, they're just flinging anything they can find. But maybe your dad wasn't there for you because he was so busy cleaning up Miss Cavvidge's shit for so many years. Like, how weird to be like, oh, all of the work he did for the

church is the reason he's a bad person. I mean, it's all complete. This is the thing about these whole two entire episodes. We've got to the point where we're just using terminology and saying things like Operation Freak Out and Going Clear and blah, blah, blah, as if it's all perfectly normal. Because we have to role play in their crazy to be able to even discuss any of this. And that is perhaps one of the most unsettling things. The rest of the website continues to of course character assassinate Mike Rinder, calling him things like a savage wife beater.

But that's basically the rest of the website. Sure. I have nothing to say about it. Yeah, sure. They didn't stop with the fair gaming there, obviously, because guess who else got fair gamed? Dead-eyed David Miscavige's very own father, Ron Miscavige. And if you are interested, I think we mentioned this in last week's episode, Ron Miscavige

does a whole interview with Joe Rogan that you can go and listen to, you can go watch, in which he claimed that Scientology rented a house opposite his and fitted it with cameras so that they could keep tabs on him. Do I think Ron Miscavige is the most reliable man in the world? No. Do I believe everything he says? No. Just make your own mind up.

I'm not going to character assassinate him on the show, but like go list to it, make your own mind up. Odd man. But is it a fascinating insight into the world of Scientology and from the father of dead-eyed Dave Miscavige? Yes. Absolutely. So Marty Rathburn has experienced similar treatment to what Ron described,

with an added twist called Squirrel Busters. So Marty Rathburn is in a particular kind of trouble because he's in my Scientology movie with Louis Thru and he audits Louis to explain how the E-meter works. And because he's blown, like he's out, that makes him a squirrel, right? Of course. So squirrel busters will show up wherever Marty Rathbun is wearing t-shirts and hats that say squirrel buster on them. And they'll just harass him and his wife.

Oh my God. Because I, like we said earlier, they own all the trademarks. They own all of the IP behind all of these things. So they're like, you can't use this outside of being an actual member of the church of Scientology. It's like cheaters. It's exactly like cheaters. Just turn up and follow you around. It's exactly like that. You will see it in any documentary about Scientology. You will see this behavior over and over and over again. To understand the tactics that Scientology used to have someone, as I just said, you can look at the documentaries, but my personal favorite is National Treasure John Sweeney,

his BBC Panorama documentary, Scientology and Me, which is the first one. There are two that he did, but the first one is Chef's Kiss. That is the first ever foray I took into the world of Scientology. When I watched that documentary. And I think I watched it when it came out. I was like at school. Yeah, yeah, same. And I was I watched it when it came out. I was like at school. Yeah, yeah, same. And I was like, what the fuck is going on? And John Sweeney is no fucking joke.

He's reported from Afghanistan and Bosnia, but it was Mike Rinder's right-hand man, Tommy Davis, that made him lose his cool. And I actually think it's one of my top three favorite television moments of all time. Yeah, because I think there was this like thread going around on Twitter where it was like the top 15, like most iconic British TV moments. And I think that I have to agree. I think John Sweeney's meltdown in the panorama documentary, Nikki on Big Brother. Who is she? Who is she? You know, RIP. And finally, it would be the episode of Come Dine With Me. What a sad life you must have, Jane.

If you don't know what we're talking about, you're probably not British or our age. Look, guys, there was a time before Netflix where the only thing you could watch on your laptop in your university halls was Come Dine With Me on 4OD. That was the only thing you could do. I finished 4OD in my first year of uni. Oh yeah, yeah. No, it was a Come Dine With Me marathons broken up by golden balls. Yes, we are old enough to remember when Netflix came in the post, children. So watch your mouth. Toby Davis is an interesting guy. He wears dark glass, he's got dark hair. He's clearly modeled himself on Tom Cruise. And he's a second generation Scientologist, so like Elizabeth Moss, his

mom was in Naked Attraction. Naked Attraction, as in the Channel 4 dating show? No. Okay. Thank God. Well, I read that and I was like, what? Do you know why? Because I didn't mean to write Naked Attraction. Fatal Attraction. I meant to write Fatal Attraction. I was very tired when I wrote this bit. Oh god. And if you don't know what Naked Attraction is, another 4OD gem,

go check that out. So the most famous John Sweeney meltdown bit, I'm not going to read to you because I love John Sweeney and I don't want to make fun of him. But essentially it's him shouting, being like, you were not there at the beginning of that interview. And then his voice just completely drops and he's like, do you understand? It's so good. It's so good. Just go watch it. It's on Dailymotion. I've linked it.

Also in the Scientology of Me documentary, what Tommy Davis does is he just turns up wherever John Sweeney is, just like magically descends from the sky with his own camera crew. So there's like cameras facing cameras filming each other. And Sweeney goes up to Tommy Davis and he's like, some people would say that Scientology is a dangerous cult and then just like goes on, goes off on like another tangent. And this is what Tommy says, he gives the following speech and he says, now listen to me for a second, you have no right to say what is and what isn't a

religion. The constitution of the United States of America guarantees one's right to practice and believe freely in this country, and the definition of religion is very clear and it's not defined by John Sweeney. For you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory and so offensive and so bigoted, and the reason you kept repeating it is because you want a reaction like you're getting right now. Well buddy buddy, you got it right here, right now. I'm angry. Real angry. I know, take me home, John Sweeney. Oh my God. I can't cope with this level of confrontation, even just read out. So that

is person to person, that interaction, that is John Sweeney v Tommy Davies. But now let's have a look at the harm that Scientology causes on a macro level. To make it to OT3 will cost you, dear listener, around $400,000, which is about probably £330,000-£340,000 sterling. And that does not include all of the books and materials that you'll need for the courses that you have to attend. And for that same reason, it's why the lowest level Scientologists never make it to OT. So they don't get to the wall of fire, which is why they practice, you know, pretty quietly. Keep the riffraff out.

Exactly. On top of that pretty hefty, eye-watering lump sum of money, auditing will cost you about $5,000 to $8,000 for a 12-hour intensive course. Off auditing alone, the Scientology Centre in Clearwater makes about $100,000 per year. For reference, members of the Sea Org earn about $30 a week. Yeah, so they're not getting it. No. Thought we'd forgotten about Tom Cruise? Well, we haven't.

We last left him running through a field of wildflowers with Nicole Kidman. If you have any knowledge of memes, you will know that their marriage did not last. But you may not know that in January 2001, Cruise made a call to Marty Rathbun asking him for help because him and Nicole were over. The reasons for their divorce have never been made public, but I think we can make an educator guess that it was probably something to do with the purity of Tom's instrument. With Nicole gone, Cruz threw himself head first into Scientology. He was given his own Scientology

nanny, John Sweeney bullying, shouty, sunglass wearing Tommy Davis. Although Crows and Kidman originally shared custody of their children, the fact that Tommy Davis kept telling the kids that their mother was a sociopath quickly meant that they decided they wanted to live with Tom Cruise full time and they wanted to go to Scientology school. Cruise also spent more and more time with Miss Cabbage and this is what he said about him, quote,

"'I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from LRH'," Elrond Hub Hubbard. And I've met the leaders of leaders. I've met them all. You're just an actor. Like I did. Yeah. That's what obviously hero worship, celebrity worship. I can't say anything about because I've spent this whole episode sucking the remedy stick, but like,

I'll say it. Yeah. I think it is that dangerous world in which we live, isn't it? Where we somehow think that people who are rich and famous are somehow superior in some way. Whether it is intellectually, morally, just spiritually within their being, they are something superior. You're right. That is the most important sentence we possibly said in these two episodes. He's just an actor. He's just a fucking actor. But mate, I know I've banged on about this already, but Tom Cruise gives me some serious fucking serial killer vibes. There's no doubt about it. If he wasn't an actor or a monk, he would be a murderer. He might be a murderer now.

I think those things can be all together in one person. Sometimes things can be two things. Yes, sometimes it can be three things. altogether in one person. Sometimes things can be two things. Yes, sometimes it can be three things. So in the post-Kidman era, Cruz dated a lot and he tried to get all of those ladies into Scientology. Again, let's do a very quick celeb gossip rundown.

You remember the time when Tom Cruise was dating Penelope Cruz? Well, he tried to get her into Scientology, but being a very committed Buddhist, she said, no, I like Panels. She's like, nah, no thanks. And Sophia Vergara also told him to jog on. She wasn't having any of the Scientology lessons. Also love her. There you go.

She's like, no thanks. So, and this is when it gets really fucking, this is when I'm talking like gets real serial killer fucking shit. Tom Cruise sent Tommy Davis and Shelley Miscavige on a mission to find him, to find him a new third wife. What? I heard about this happening at the time. Like in my posh girls school in deepest darkest England, I heard about this happening.

I did not, but I'm fascinated. I'm fucking fascinated because Tommy Davis and Mrs Miskavage held literal auditions for the next Mrs. Cruz after Tom had such trouble converting his string of starlets into the order. I'm guessing that took quite its toll on Tom Cruise because he obviously thinks he's Mr. Charisma, he's Mr. Golden and he can't convert these women into Scientology. I know. That must have been a real kick in the dick for him.

And they're just actors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A real kick in his pure instrument. So with Shelley Miscavige and Tommy Davis actually even struggling themselves, they decided that the next Mrs. Cruz should already be a Scientologist. What you're about to hear is fucking tragic. It truly is. They ruined her life. Yeah.

Yeah. It's tragic in the sense that they ruined this woman's life, but it's also tragic in how fucking pathetic it is. Because Davis and Miscavige, Mrs. Miscavige, landed on aspiring actress Nazanin Boniadi, who was just 25 years old at the time. Just to put that into context, Tom Cruise was 42. Nazanin was Iranian, she'd been brought up in London, she was extremely well educated and of course she was also a hottie.

Smoke show, like just the most beautiful woman. And it also helped that she was an OT5. She's been through the wall of fire already and she's just stuck around for it, so she's golden. She is. So in November 2004, Nazanin was told that she'd been selected for a super secret program. So secret in fact, that she couldn't even tell her mum. And her mum's a Scientologist. That was another tick on her list was that her family were

in. Yeah, yeah. Nazanin being an aspiring human rights activist assumed that she was being fast-tracked into some sort of humanitarian Scientology ambassador outreach program, whatever. But things got weird pretty quickly because Nazanin was told that she needed to break up with her long-term boyfriend. She initially refused because she didn't see what being single had to do with her altitude for ambassadorship. So Tommy Davis and his crew pulled the same shit that they had pulled with Cruises' first wife Mimi Rogers. They brought Nazanin and her partner into a

face-to-face audit in which her partner admitted to having cheated on Nazanin multiple times. And the worst thing was that Nazanin was made to feel guilty about the whole situation because she had audited her boyfriend previously and she had missed all of the infidelities. And so, as you can imagine, that situation swiftly put an end to that relationship. Next up, Nazanin was given $20,000 to spend on a new wardrobe. And then totally by accident on purpose, she was taken to New York where she happened to run into Tom Cruise. This is like some fucking Tudor court bullshit.

That's exactly what it is. So Nazanin was taken ice skating and then to a sushi restaurant by the superstar. And that just so happened to be what she had told Tommy Davis her ideal date would be. The sushi's fine. The ice skating sounds like hell. Ice skating with Tom Cruise? Yeah, no, I'd rather die. So after this ice skating sushi extravaganza, which was obviously completely set up by Tommy Davis, the pair hung out together on the set

of War of the Worlds, another absolutely dogshit film. And then came the inevitable non-disclosure agreement. Tommy Davis told Nazanin three things. Firstly, her humanitarian mission was off the cards. Secondly, she needed to focus solely on her relationship with Tom Cruise. And thirdly, that if she hurt Mr. Top Gun, Tommy Davis would personally destroy her. Jesus Christ. It's like when your best friend gets a boyfriend and you're like, if you even think about hurting

her, I will ruin your life. But Tommy Davis means that in no time at all, Nazanin was cohabiting with Mr. Cruise. The new couple went on holiday with the Miss Carvages and Nazanin wasn't feeling particularly well so she wasn't as peppy as Miss Cavvage wanted her to be. And because of that, I think it was a one comment she made. The trip was deemed a total disaster. Cruise was furious and he said to Nazanin, you don't get it. It goes like this. First, there's LRH. Then there's COB, Chairman of the Board, David Miscavige. Then there's LRH, then there's COB, Chairman of the Board, David Miscavige, then there's me. If he hasn't already killed someone, it's very soon on the cards, I think.

Yeah. Allegedly. Just two weeks after this nightmare holiday, Nazanin was moved out of Cruz's home. He didn't even say goodbye. The last thing she sees of him is he's in the gym as she's been escorted out of this house that she's living in. He doesn't even look at her. This is just unbelievable. But he did pay for her to get to OT7 to help her with her grief, he said. It was very nice of him. How big of you, Mr. Cruise. In February 2005, Nazanin was sent to Clearwater where she was reported for treason for speaking

badly about Tom Cruise. All she was doing was talking to her friends about how heartbroken she was and that was a treasonous offence. As her penance, she was made to clean public toilets with a toothbrush. She was banned from the celebrity centre and told never to speak to Tom Cruise again. My heart bleeds for this woman. Like that is torture. Look, I don't want to sound callous. I don't want to sound callous. But when I hear about shit like this going down with Scientology and with other religions in and of itself, I'm like, you do realize you don't have to be there. But I get it. She's embroiled in it. Her family are in it. She can't. But I'm like, you're cleaning toilets

with a toothbrush and basically being like hounded. Like you could go live in the normal world and that not happen to you. But I understand the brainwashing. They also follow you though. That's true. That's true. You are trapped in it, but I'm like, what? What? Yeah. Anyway, so obviously project Nazanin had failed. Tommy Davis and Shelley Miscavige were therefore back at square one. And they decided to try and look outside of the church this time for a more amenable

target than the likes of someone like Penelope Cruz. So looking for a patsy, someone they can just pull in who will be more flexible, who will go along with things, who will be a bit more, dare I say, submissive and subservient to their cause. Allegedly, this rotor of interviews that they then conducted included the likes of Kate Bosworth, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Scarlett Johansson, and of course, Katie Holmes. Now if you've ever read Hello Magazine, you'll know who made the cut. Katie Holmes apparently had always had a crush on Tom Cruise.

She saw him in Risky Business when she was four years old and that apparently stayed with her. I feel like marrying your sexual awakening is never good news. I'm also just like, what's wrong with all these people that they're being interviewed to become the next Mrs. fucking Tom Cruise? And they're like, yeah, that's something I want to do. Because they're like, I want to be a star. I don't want anything in the world enough to be Mrs. Tom Cruise.

I also realized no one is asking me to be. There is nothing in the world that I want enough to be interviewed to be Mrs. Tom Cruise. And this is why I don't have that much sympathy for them because you just want to be famous. You just want to be really fucking famous. That's not a noble pursuit in my mind. So like you putting yourself in the situation because that's what you wanted. It's not nice what happens to you but I just don't care sorry so the pair met in real life we're talking about Tom Cruise and

his new would-be wife Katie Holmes for the first time in April 2005 Katie told Jay Leno that it was love at first sight for her and then famously of course Tom Cruise went on Oprah and seemingly destroyed a sofa and acted like a total fucking lunatic. If you haven't seen it, we're not going to describe it for you here because it cannot be described in words. If you haven't seen it, just watch it. It is bonkers.

It is one of the most cringe worthy things that I've ever had the misfortune of accidentally seeing. It's horrendous. It is so clearly a man with no concept of what real life is. No, no, no. And when he's doing it, because it's obviously a very exuberant thing that he's doing, he still looks dead behind the eyes though. It's like when that smile doesn't quite reach your eyes. Yeah. It's uncanny. So in November 2006, Katie Holmes wed Tom Cruise in a castle just outside Rome. David Miscavige was the best man and the guest list was suitably star-spangled.

Amongst those stars there gathered was St. Leah Remini. Still very much a Scientologist at the time, Hawkeye Leah realised that the First Lady of her faith, Shelley Muscavige, was not there. And this is especially odd because Scientology has very strict rules about not leaving your partner in the lurch. When Leah asked Tommy Davis where Shelley was, he told her, quote, you don't have the fucking rank to ask about that.

This guy's so gross. I hate him. Yeah, yeah, not a huge Tommy Davis fan. I think he's left now, but I'm not sure. So I've also heard in interviews, Leah Remini talking about David Miscavige when she says, you know, where's your wife? And he's like, do you know what I do all day, Leah? I fuck up assholes like you. All words to that effect. So they're being intimidating, they're shutting her down. And

the thing about Scientology is that they actively encourage you to snitch on other members of the church. And the idea is that no one is above the reporting. Oh yes. The classic. So if you see a fellow Scientologist doing something they shouldn't like heroin or jumping on a sofa on national television, making an absolute joke out of your religion, you write a report on that person. It doesn't matter what their rank is. So Leah wrote a report on dead-eyed Dave. She also wrote a report on Tom when he went on Oprah. It's also quite weird though, all of the report writing. I mean, sure. But like, I think the thing is the difference for me between, obviously, my most

salient point of reference is the Catholic church, because that's what I grew up in. It's not that different because you confess, right? The difference between Scientology and the Catholic Church with the confession and the reporting and the snitching on each other, blah, blah, blah, is the thing, the Catholic Church, no record is kept. It's just in the priest's brain. The record keeping is the problem for me. I mean, it's all a problem for me. It's all a problem for me. And I'm like, well done, Leah, for getting out. But I'm like, even all this report writing, it's all just so weird. I cannot, I have no frame of reference. I cannot get my head into it. But here we are. So Leah writes a report on Dead Eye Dave, which obviously goes down like a sack of shit.

And Leah's sent to Clearwater to repent and rescind her reports. And that was the beginning of the end for Leah Remini. Soon she left Scientology for good, at great cost to herself. So why wasn't Shelley Miscavige at the wedding in Rome? Let's take a look. In 2004, when the hole was opened on Goldbase, David Miscavige was spending a lot of time with his communicator, Lew Henley-Smith. And according to journalist Tony Ortega, Shelley was suspicious that they might be having an affair.

That summer, Shelley and David Miscavige got into a very public fight aboard the Free Winds. Again, not very clear of them, is it? Miscavige publicly degraded his wife at Tom Cruise's birthday party. In 2005, Miscavige left Gold Base, leaving his wife Shelley behind. While he was gone, she filled in an org board. And when Miss Gavage returned, he was furious and left straight away. Shelley attempted to follow him.

A week later, Shelley puts Miss Gavage's stuff into storage. Then the next day, Shelley vanished. Many assume that she's been sent to the hole, others say that she's been taken to another base on the east of Los Angeles that Ortega calls Twin Peaks. God, they really have no originality whatsoever. And she was seen only once in public after this. In 2007, she was escorted to her father's funeral, and then she has never been seen again. In 2013, Leah Remini filed a missing persons report

with the LAPD, who told the press that the report was unfounded. They claimed that a detective had visited Shelley who was alive and well, and certainly not being held against her will. In 2016, an anonymous tipper offerer claimed to have seen a disheveled looking Shelley along with two handlers in a town near the Twin Peaks base. Remini made further attempts to gain documentation on Shelley's location from the LAPD and her requests were denied.

There was no investigation into the sighting of Shelley. And do you know why that is? Do you know who funds the LAPD? Is it Scientology? Is it Scientology? What? Yeah, they make enormous donations every time they open like a new branch, the LAPD like clap.

Even actually, even when Church Scientology opened in the UK, someone from the police gave an opening speech when they opened the church. Like they've got the police like round their fingers like for sure. That's unbelievable. Tony Ortega, the journalist, I'm a big fan of him. He has probably the most famous blog on Scientology. It's called The Underground Bunker, really well written and very clear timelines of stuff like the Lisa MacPherson affair and also Shelley Miscavige Go Missing. And every year Tony Ortega publishes an article

entitled Does Shelley Miscavige Know It's Christmas? Which is pretty funny. That's very good. And if Shelley is still alive, which we don't know, she will be 61 on the 18th of January 2022, so this year, next week even, it's her birthday. She hasn't been seen since she was 44. Fucking hell. You don't need me to tell you that dead-eye David Miscavige is an incredibly abusive man. We heard what he did to Mike Rinder. I think it's not a far stretch to say that this is playing out through a massive, what is now widely accepted institution, organization, cult, domestic abuse. Oh, I don't doubt it.

She hasn't been seen for fucking almost 20 years. This is it. This is it. The thing is, so Leah Remini says, if Shelley is alive, if she is alive and well, which she may well not be, she is being held against her will in some sort of Stockholm Syndrome situation on the Twin Peaks space. Either way, it is extremely likely that nobody is ever going to see Shelley Miscavige again. And the LAPD seemed completely fine with that.

This is the thing. It's complicated, isn't it? I mean, not from like a moral aspect. No, it's pretty straightforward. It's pretty straightforward, morally speaking. But like if the LAPD, let's say giving them the benefit, the doubt that they have gone and they have investigated and they have been presented with a Shelley Miscavige and Shelley Miscavige is like Nazanin, what's her face when she's cleaning the toilets with the toothbrush still not leaving? Yes, I'm fine. I'm happy. I'm here. I'm not going outside because I'm doing penance because we are a religion. Technically, she's an adult woman. They can't do much to intervene and remove her from that situation if she says she wants to be

there. No they can't. And this is the thing. That's why cult cult cult cult cult. So that's the Shelley-Miss Kavage situation. But we have one more scandal for you before we leave you this week. And that is one concerning a man named Paul Haggis. If you don't know who Paul Haggis is, you absolutely should. He is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby and Crash. And he was also a Scientologist for absolutely decades. And very well, we haven't mentioned Paul, Paul, my friend. We haven't mentioned Paul Haggis yet.

Going clear, the book is very centered around Paul's personal journey with Scientology. And the reason I haven't included it thus far is that I always worry about like the authors of the books being like, oh, if you're just going to summarize my work, you can get fucked. So like the Paul Haggis story, apart from this part of it, I have left out, if you want to find out about it, please go and read Going Clear. I really can't recommend it enough. So if by this point into our two episode series on Scientology, you don't already think them to be a despicable organization, maybe this will convince you

because Scientology stance on homosexuality has never been a secret. To be gay puts you at a 1.2 on the tone scale. So basically homosexuality is seen as a PTS, so a potential trouble source. Basically it's seen as something that needs to be audited. So here we have a very offensive, derogatory, backward, moronic view on homosexuality, that it is a mental illness to be cured.

That is what Scientology is saying. And in 1954 Hubbard wrote, quote, "'Homosexuality is about as serious as sneezes and members of the Sea Org have been fired for their sexuality. This was a problem for Paul Haggis. His daughter is gay and he was troubled to learn that she had been shunned within Scientology because of this.

So in 2009, after years on the inside, Haggis, very prominent in the church at the time, wrote the following letter to shouty, sweary, disgusting Tommy Davis. And this is what the letter said. As you know, for 10 months now, I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology

of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California, rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state, is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us. You and I both know that there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear

Scientologists making derogatory remarks about gay people and then quote LRH in their defense. Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent." And with that, Paul Haggis resigned his membership at the Church of Scientology and signed off. A group of Scientologists descended on Paul Haggis' house soon after he'd sent this letter and they tried to convince him to return. It didn't work. So there you have it. Scientology, a self-referential semantic labyrinth that cons people out of money, vanishes wives and ruins lives. But there are people who really, truly believe in it. And the worship of Elr on Habbod might seem unsavoury if you think of him as just a madman. But did Jesus

really raise Lazarus from the dead? Did Muhammad really ascend into heaven on the back of a winged horse? And if they didn't, would Islam or Christianity exist? The point is that every founder of every religion, major or minor, is perceived by their followers to be something more than human, and where Scientology differs is they want to be seen as the scientific path to enlightenment. Marty Rathbun categorises those who leave Scientology into three groups. Those like Paul Haggis who turn their back on every teaching and never look back. Those who believe in the doctrine but not in dead-eyed Dave's tyranny, and finally, those who are struggling to balance what they have gained with what

thousands of others have lost. So is Scientology dangerous, harmful, terrifying and covert? Absolutely. Should it be stopped? Yes. Is the only way to stop them by revoking their tax exemption leaving them on a sure-fire path to bankruptcy? 100%. If they had nothing to hide, if they were doing nothing wrong, then why would they savage

those like John Sweeney who request access to their inner workings? That's what separates Scientology from, quote unquote, accepted major religions. No one is stalked for leaving the Catholic Church. If they have nothing to hide, why won't they show us? That's the key thing. No one is shunned for asking questions about Buddhism. That is the major difference, I think, between cult and religion is that a religion will not vilify you for asking questions. LARLEY It's like a very puritanical, pasto religion that is yet to evolve, but it won't evolve because that's not the aim. So the question that many people ask is, is Scientology a legitimate religion or is it a cult?

I think we've made ourselves pretty clear which one we think it is, but I also think it really doesn't fucking matter because just because something is a religion doesn't mean they should be shielded from anything when they're doing fucked up shit. Like I don't think religion, I mean, I don't think any religion

should have tax exemption either. Like that's how you solve world hunger, tax the Vatican. Just because something is a religion does not excuse it from moral scrutiny. And I think that's something we really need to get on top of. Yeah. I mean, it's 2022 and we still would give undeserved reverence to religion. It's a choice. It's a way of life that you have chosen. It deserves to be on equal footing with anything that deserves to be questioned. And that lack of questioning and the lack of critical thinking is how people get sucked into things like Scientology. So there you have it. Scientology. We've done it. If we disappear off the face of the earth,

Dead Eye Dave did it. Please get in touch. Make me a Leah Remini statue for my desk and we'll see you next week for something else entirely. What are we doing? Peter Manuel. Peter Manuel, we are. We are heading back to the UK, back to a serial killer. Why the hell not? A nice change of pace after two weeks with our minds melting in the world of Scientology. I finished the script a couple of days ago and then I just looked at Saru and I was like, what do I do now? Hold your breath for that one and if you would like some more delicious Red Handed, then you can head on over to patreon.com slash red handed where we've got tons and tons and

tons of bonus content for you. And if you just want some more of us and you want it for free, well, you can do that if you head on over to Spotify now and check out our brand new Spotify exclusive podcast called Sinister Society. Lots of culty goodness for you over there. We actually had to get their express permission to be able to cover Scientology on Red Handed. It's a really good laugh. We have a great time recording it. So please head on over to Spotify and check that out. And now everyone's favorite part of the show. Thank you ever so much to our Patreon supporters. We've got Brandy Smith, Megan Reinkeke, something, Crystal Garcia, James Tran, Marielle Rieda, Nicholas Turner, Ashley Hall, Jeanette Tameo, Justin Franco,

Lindsay I or L, maybe Chelsea Phillips, Lizzie P, Emily Galway, Maeve Corrigan, Franz Vandermark, Jessica Cottenham, Kerry Francis, Stephanie Rachel Rebekkagee, Liz Stewart, Gabby Thorpe, The Inky Hand, Faith Evertson, Megan Haag, Lashia King, Trisha McCauley, Kat Bronte-Farquhar, Cassandra Morton-Prentice, Abby Taylor, Sam Harris, Ivy Chastain, Sarah Paich, Shaz Bagrat, Jasmine Davis, Stephanie, Charlotte Lafferty, Amy Ross, Megan Katz-Sanowis, Claire Jenkins, Britt Peterson, Jenny Rowe, Mary Martin, Kay Powell, Jessica Young, Charbel, Cathy DeWell, Sophia Fisher, Sarah Leonard, Kate Finlay, Lauren S. Christina, Hannah, Heather Lawson, Sumayya, Leonite, Rebecca Lee F. Jatton, Danielle Speck, Amber Nasser, Plain Jane Doe, Alexis Assam, Parker, Elmer Brine, Lauren

Robinson, Cassandra, Jonathan Caesar, Katie Laffard, Jasmine Lampard even, Victoria Cabarello, Carmen Marshall, Kat SP, oh, suppressive person, Sophie Statenkow, Lucien Amanda Brown, Sarah Sarah Collins Roberts Laura Duthit Amy Hayward Emma Mahaffy Katie Atel-Te-Xia Raleigh Campbell Ariel Game Karolina Simpian Hannah Jan-Hun-Hun Holly Norrington Lucy Shacklock Molly Carroll Joanna Durick, Neil Jason, Kate Anne Ste, Kyra Samankus, Mary F Chang, Sam Haber, Alexa Langham, Kaylee Wilson and Chelsea Kekuna

Well done. Kala Kola. Very good run. There we go guys. And that noise you just heard was the studio telling us to fuck off. So we will be somewhere else when you hear us next time. We don't know where. We'll see you then. Goodbye. We acting bad, bad, bad, bad. We. We try to hurt nobody.

For decades he was untouchable. But now it's all coming undone Sean combs the mogul as we know it is over he will never be that person again even if he's found not guilty of these charges. I'm Jesse Weber host of law and crimes, the rise and fall of did the federal trial a front row seat to the biggest trial in entertainment history, sex trafficking racketeering prostitution allegations by federal prosecutors that span

decades and witnesses were finally speaking out. The spotlight is harsher the stakes are higher and for did there may be no second chances. You can listen to the rise and fall of did the federal trial exclusively with one 3 plus joined one 3 plus in the one 3 app spotify or Apple podcast right now. Well the secrets that killing call a BBC World Service investigation into the murder of Punjabi singer and rapper Apple podcast right now. There are so many rumors. No one wants to talk. There might be repercussions. World of Secrets. That killing call.

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