John Sweeney - The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology

THE CHURCH OF FEAR

JOHN SWEENEY

Your next endless trillions of years and the whole agonized future of every man, woman and child on this planet depend on what you do here and now, with and in Scientology.

- L Ron Hubbard.

Some people, well, if they dont like Scientology, well, then, fuck you. Really. Fuck you. Period.

- Tom Cruise.

Ours is often called an age of scepticism. Let us see whether this is not, on the contrary, an age of fatuous credulity.

- CH Rolph.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

W elcome to the Church of Fear. Tom Cruise and John Travolta and a host of Hollywoods finest will tell you that the Church of Scientology is a force for good, that it helps you communicate better, understand yourself more, become a more superior kind of being.

But beware: the Church is not what it seems. Go, for example, to the organisations recruiting centre on Londons Tottenham Court Road and you will see L Ron Hubbards Dianetics in the window, illustrated by a volcano erupting red-hot rocks. Thats a subtle hint, some say, to the Churchs secret cosmology, its belief that mans inhumanity to man is caused by a space alien Satan massacring space aliens in volcanoes 75 million years ago. The Church denies that, and much else.

Instantly, reader, you should be aware what the Church says of me: that I am a bigot and a liar, that I am psychotic. A member of the Church of Scientology has said on his blog: John Sweeney is genuinely evil.

I used to be a war reporter. From Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya to Zimbabwe I have been shelled, shot at, bombed, arrested, threatened and a Serb devotee of Slobodan Milosevic once stuck two sticks of dynamite up my nose. But never, ever, in all my times in all those wars have I felt under such harrowing psychological pressure as I did inside the brainwashing section of the Church of Scientologys exhibition, Psychiatry: The Industry of Death on Sunset Boulevard in LA in the spring of 2007.

I am not a timid man but I was afraid then and am afraid now, afraid of them and afraid of it. I fear that by even attempting to write this book I risk ruin. I am afraid of enormous legal bills breaking me and my family; afraid of not telling the whole truth, and letting down the ordinary, extraordinary people who have had the courage to get out and who have suffered so much because of the Church; afraid of letting down general readers because the book may be too faint-hearted, the story too legally constricted to understand. But if I write too bluntly, I fear the Church will strike me down. I have wrestled with those fears for five years.

Back in 2007 in the brainwashing section of their exhibition, I was afraid they were brainwashing me. I was afraid that I was about to lose my grip on reality and I lost my temper with a volcanic passion that still frightens me, that makes me wonder where it came from. I roared at Tommy Davis, a leading acolyte of the Church, close friend and, in a bad light, lookalike of its number one Hollywood apostle, Tom Cruise.

John Sweeney: No Tommy you stop there

Tommy Davis: Brain washing! Brainwashing is a crime!

John Sweeney: You listen to me!

Tommy Davis: Brainwashing is a crime!

John Sweeney: YOU WERE NOT THERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVIEW. YOU WERE NOT THERE.

The YouTube video of me losing it, released by the Church a few days before our BBC Panorama on the Church, went viral. If you add up the figures from the main sites I got seven million hits. And then a kicking from the global media.

In the United States, news shows fronted by Styrofoam-bouffant-haired presenters with names like Cindy and Scott raised eyebrows at my outburst. In Britain, the headline in Rupert Murdochs News of the World ran: TV MAN IN A FURY: A Panorama reporter has shamed the BBC with a hysterical rant during an investigation into Scientology. Balding TV veteran John Sweeney flipped while interviewing Tommy Davis, son of actress Anne Archer. He screamed, sprayed spittle into Daviss face and jabbed his index finger in a row over brainwashing. Charles Moore wrote in the Spectator: If you want to see how BBC people can behave when they are feeling righteous, do watch John Sweeney of Panorama screaming dementedly at some members of the Church of Scientology (available on YouTube) when they objected to his interview techniques. He looks and sounds like a secret police interrogator.

I apologised then and I apologise now. I was wrong. Civilised discourse is the engine oil of democracy and by losing it and doing an impression of an exploding tomato I let down the values I cherish. It was a propaganda gift from heaven to the Church.

But that was not the moment when I felt most crushed by the power and reach of this thing I fear. The worst moment was not being followed by creepy private eyes on the streets of Los Angeles; not being shouted at; not being called a bigot relentlessly by Tommy Davis, the son of the actress whose bunny got boiled in Fatal Attraction; not returning to our hotel in Florida to find the Churchs agents waiting for us at midnight; not the creepy strangers harassing us in the States; not the creepy stranger knocking on the door of my neighbour back in London; not the mystery person who appeared in the shrubbery at our wedding in a fort in Cornwall. No, it was none of those.

The worst moment came a couple of weeks after I had lost it in LA but before our documentary made air. I was walking out of White City tube station in west London, towards the grim Grey Lubyanka, the concrete cardboard box that then housed the office of the BBC Current Affairs department. My colleague Patrick Barrie got a call on his mobile. He listened, said a few words and then killed the call and gave me the strange news.

Wed just been to film a woman who counted herself a victim of the Church. The mother, lets call her Betty, made us comfortable in the front room of her spotlessly clean house. She was elegant, house-proud, funny, sweet but her story was unbearably sad. Betty was a hard-working single mum, with two grown-up children, lets call them Phil and Samantha. Phil had died a few years previously in an accident on Friday, the 13th. Every anniversary of that grim date Betty and Sam would meet up for a chat and a cry. If one or the other was away, they would get on the phone and mourn their loss.

Then Sam joined the Church of Scientology. Betty told me that her daughter a beautiful, loving, kind, considerate woman turned, she said, into a stranger, someone cold, unfeeling, hard. Her mum became worried beyond words, not just because Sam was spending so much time and money on the Church, but because it felt like she had mutated into an entirely different being. Sam disconnected it is a term of art in Scientology - from her mother: no contact, no phonecalls, no birthday cards, no Christmas cards, no Mothers Day cards, but worst of all, no contact on the anniversary of Phils death. No Friday the 13th, no mourning of a dead son and brother.

Betty dared to visit the restaurant where Samantha worked because she missed her so. Sam didnt ignore her mother. That was too weak a word. It was as if Betty did not exist. It was, Betty told me, horrible: it kills me. Through the mirror I could see her turn round quickly and she said, have I got thick written across my head? I said, no, and she said, you are not doing any favours coming in here with your innocent face and I said, I just like coming, and she said, I dont want you in here.

Betty walked away from her adored child. I cried and thought, this is my daughter What am I going to do? How long is this going to go on? Her mind, said Betty, seems totally twisted and taken over and I cant get through to her. They say its a religion. I dont class it as a religion. In my opinion its a cult.