Can’t Handle The Truth? How a ‘New Yorker’ Reporter and a Team of Fact-Checkers Took on the Church of Scientology
Hubbard.
Lawrence Wright’s new book on Scientology, Going Clear (Knopf, 448 pp., $28.95), was spun out of his 2011 story forThe New Yorker about director Paul Haggis’s break with the church. Two magazine fact-checkers worked on the story full-time for four to six months of its yearlong inception, and close to publication they were joined by three more. Their first message to the church, verifying facts about its practices, the life of L. Ron Hubbard and the church’s current leader, David Miscavige, contained 971 questions. Peter Canby, head of the magazine’s fact-checking department, said it was the most “difficult and complicated” story he’s ever worked on in his 19 years at The New Yorker. Second place, he said, went to another piece by Mr. Wright, a profile of Ayman al-Zawahiri that came out in 2002, “when we probably knew more about al-Zawahiri than the CIA did.”
As recounted in the Haggis piece, in September 2010 the church sent two flacks and four lawyers to the New Yorker offices at 4 Times Square in a grand effort to respond to those questions and to see if they couldn’t dissuade the editors from publishing the piece.
The meeting lasted about eight hours. The Scientology team, outfitted in sharp suits, frequently giggled as Mr. Wright defended his sources. The church representatives presented charts that detailed everything they perceived to be wrong with the story, based on what they knew about it from the fact-checking questions. Tommy Davis, the church’s lead spokesman at the time, would often interrupt Mr. Wright’s references to the church leader, saying, “you mean Mr.Miscavige, Larry, Mr. Miscavige.”
“He had a pie chart of the 971 questions we’d sent him,” Mr. Wright said, recalling the meeting during a recent interview at the Random House offices. “The pie chart showed that 59 percent of them were false.” He let that sink in. “They’re questions! How do they fall into the true-false category? It was bizarre to me.”
It wasn’t a complete wash. The Scientology team brought along 48 binders in bankers boxes, which they left with the journalists, claiming the material within would refute all their false questions. Lined up in a row, they were seven feet long. During a bathroom break shortly after the binders were revealed, New Yorker editor David Remnick pulled Mr. Wright aside. “You know what you got here, you schmuck?” Mr. Remnick said. “You’ve got a book!”
The meeting at the New Yorker offices would come to represent the church’s whole attitude in dealing with Mr. Wright’s fact-checking questions—the pull its representatives seemed to feel between knowing what was going to be in a story and their inability to respond to it fully.
Scientology represents a unique test of the fact-checking system, if investigative fact-checking can be seen as a mixture of research and, in Mr. Canby’s words, “controlled explosions” that allow the subject to respond, or freak out, before publication. The questions that arose over the course of writing this book, like those concerning physical abuse, often did merit some kind of a response, and the publishers’ incentive to keep the church’s “explosions” controlled was strong, given Scientology’s penchant for lawsuits. These high stakes, though, invariably run up against a lack of access—given Scientology’s secrecy and strict PR policy, you might have a better chance of getting quotes from the Taliban. Fact-checking becomes the battlefield upon which the piece is hashed out.
Mr. Wright’s main contact for the book was Karin Pouw, who had replaced Tommy Davis as head press officer for the church in the time since Mr. Wright had written the New Yorker story. Initially she told Mr. Wright and his assistant handling the fact-checking for the book, Lauren Wolf, that it would take seven days to respond to each fact-checking question, a rate of just 52 a year. Ms. Wolf eventually sent 160 questions, in a dozen or so emails, doing her best to work with Ms. Pouw’s schedule, but the lag time between query and response only increased over the course of the book’s writing. Ms. Wolf often wouldn’t hear back for weeks at a time.
In an email to The Observer, Ms. Pouw wrote that the church had been forthcoming with Mr. Wright and that her team “answered all of his questions,” for the book, though Mr. Wright said he found her far less helpful than Mr. Davis, who seemed to offer more actual responses to fact-checking questions. “Some of them were outright lies and fabrications, in my opinion,” Mr. Wright said, “but still, they were responses.”
Early on, Ms. Pouw’s staff put forth a general policy of not addressing questions unless they knew the sources for them, which Mr. Wright couldn’t provide on principle (and also because the church has a record of allegedly harassing those who speak out against it). According to Ms. Pouw, Mr. Wright once wrote her an email that said, “It seems that the only thing you’re really interested in is getting a list of my sources. You can have that as soon as the book is published, not before.”
Consequently, Mr. Wright said, the responses they did receive were often confusing, or not substantive.
“For instance,” he said at Random House, “we asked about some moveable text in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. We were trying to figure out which was the authoritative version, because in this edition it says this, but in this edition it doesn’t say that. Or in this edition it’s here rather than here.” He turned to Ms. Wolf, who sat in on the interview. “What was the response to that one?”
Ms. Wolf glanced at the ceiling. “They asked us if we were accusing them of messing with L. Ron Hubbard’s work, basically,” she said.
“Which they were!” Mr. Wright said. “But we just wanted—there was no hostile intent, we just wanted to footnote something and asked how we should do that.”
“Literally,” Ms. Wolf said, “‘What page number should we use?’”
They’d also quibble over semantics. Ms. Wolf soon learned not to include any clauses in her questions, to keep things as clear as possible. At the New Yorker meeting, Mr. Davis had found fault with Mr. Wright’s referring to something that had happened “recently,” when in fact it had happened two weeks prior.
The church responded more helpfully to questions about L. Ron Hubbard than it did about David Miscavige, Mr. Wright said. The section concerning the modern church has asterisks every 20 pages or so with a statement at the bottom of the page asserting that whatever is being described never happened. For the first half, about Hubbard’s life, the church seems to have been much more cooperative, and even confirmed some elements of the church that may seem unsavory to those outside it, like “overboarding,” a religious practice that is exactly what it sounds like—Hubbard came up with the idea in order to punish people during a period when the church’s top members lived at sea.
Mr. Wright worked with whatever he received from the church’s press officers. The cache of binders wasn’t packed with guarded Scientology secrets, but it was still useful to him as a resource about the life of L. Ron Hubbard, the topic on which he expanded his article most significantly for the book. “It led me in other directions,” Mr. Wright said, “because I got into the church’s thinking.”
One essential document came out of that meeting at 4 Times Square, a “Notice of Separation from the U.S. Naval Service” for Hubbard, provided by the church, that offers an impressive war record. Mr. Wright managed to find another copy of this document through his own research, one that shows a less storied Naval career. His attitude throughout the writing seemed to be that every opening the church representatives offered was an opportunity.
Even the church’s evasiveness was helpful in its own way. Mr. Wright said he asked questions relating to alleged physical abuse by Mr. Miscavige. “I think it’s very telling, when you ask direct questions like that” and there’s no response, Mr. Wright said, adding that “at the very least, they could have denied them.”
Many of their responses instead included a deluge of information about new churches that have opened around the world, similar to the advertorial that recently ran on The Atlantic’s website.
“It’s always the same,” said Tony Ortega, the former editor of The Village Voice, who has been reporting on the church since 1995 and is at work on his own book about Scientology. “That’s why I don’t really worry about it too much. I see reporters all the time dutifully ask them for a comment, as they should, and the church always puts out the same exact comment over and over and over. You can write it yourself. One: everyone’s lying about us. Two: no one’s reporting about our fantastic expansion. That’s it. That’s all they ever say to anybody.”
Before publication, anyway. Ms. Pouw, in an e-mail to The Observer, called Mr. Wright’s fact-checking “shabby,” and gave a long list of denials. She called one of his sources, used for a single anecdote in the book, “a self-admitted inveterate liar,” and picked away at some of the book’s details, e.g.:
Mr. Wright claims that the Church of Scientology owns a bank and schools in Clearwater, Florida. We don’t and never have. Checking public records or a simple call to bank regulators would have confirmed that we don’t own a bank, nor are we the landlord to any bank nor do we own any parcels of land on which a bank sits. We purchased an empty building in Florida that prior to 1975 housed a bank, but it hasn’t been a bank in 37 years and never housed bank during the entire time we have owned it.
(In the book, it’s actually only referred to as a “bank building.”)
Mr. Ortega said he’s seen the church’s tactics for dealing with the media change over the years. In the ’90s, he said, it seemed to want to court editors and writers as a way of trying to win positive press. He even once had lunch with Ms. Pouw at the church’s Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. Then in the 2000s, he said, it shifted to a model in which it refuted everything said about it, a period Mr. Ortega says he most associates with Mr. Davis. When asked about whether the church closes off its members from their more skeptical relatives, Mr. Davis told CNN anchor John Roberts in 2008 that the church had no policy of “disconnection.” This was seen as a bold claim, since many family members who have been labeled heretics by the church can testify that they’re no longer allowed to speak with adherent kin. The reporter Joe Childs, who with his colleague Thomas C. Tobin produced the landmark Truth Rundown series in The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) about allegations of abuse by Mr. Miscavige, told The Observer that he had a good working relationship with Mr. Davis, though Mr. Davis’s response to that series was to round up a number of Scientologists who swore up and down that it was all false.
Mr. Ortega said that, like Mr. Wright, he doesn’t hear much from the church these days. His last contact with Ms. Pouw was over a widely distributed anti-Scientology e-mail sent by Debbie Cook, a former Scientology executive, on New Year’s Eve 2011. Mr. Childs said he still receives comments from Ms. Pouw, though the nature of their relationship is different because his paper is local.
It’s not as though the church disregards its media profile. The spokesperson job has been a historically difficult role. One of the church’s first major whistle-blowers was Robert Vaughn Young, who worked as the church spokesman under Hubbard. There’s a YouTube video in which Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, two former spokesmen for the church, describe sitting in on speakerphone interviews in which Mr. Miscavige was in the room but refused to speak to the reporters, instead writing his responses on a legal pad that they had to read verbatim. Both have now left the church. Mr. Davis has at least relinquished his position as spokesman, if he hasn’t left the church entirely.
Fact-checking in particular seems to have become a fixation for the church. After the New Yorker story ran, an issue of the Scientologist magazine Freedom ran an issue dedicated to smearing Mr. Haggis, and the article. A copy arrived, via courier, at Mr. Wright’s house in Austin, Texas. Clipped to the front page was a type-written note that presented to Mr. Wright “your personal FACT-CHECKED copy.”
dduray@observer.com
Update, Jan. 29: An earlier version of this post misstated the resignation date of Debbie Cook. We’ve also clarified Mr. Davis’s current status with the church
http://observer.com/2013/01/cant-handle-the-truth-how-a-new-yorker-reporter-and-a-team-of-fact-checkers-took-on-the-church-of-scientology/
http://observer.com/2013/01/cant-handle-the-truth-how-a-new-yorker-reporter-and-a-team-of-fact-checkers-took-on-the-church-of-scientology/
Renowned journalist throws the book at Scientology
(RNS) After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his expose of al-Qaida, journalist Lawrence Wright turned his eye toward another secretive and controversial religious movement.
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Lawrence Wright talks to Religion News Service about his new book “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief.” RNS photo courtesy Alfred A. Knopf.
Download or purchase this photo. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.
The Church of Scientology boasts a glittering roster of celebrity adherents and landmark real estate. But beneath that surface, Wright says, sits a troubling web of deceit, violence and paranoia.
His new book “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief,” uncovers a church in which the founder lied about his wartime exploits, top executives are regularly abused and children sign billion-year contracts to work for low wages under poor conditions.
The Church of Scientology emphatically denies Wright’s charges, calling them “ludicrous” and “unsubstantiated.” The church has also dedicated a website to correcting what they see as errors in the book.
Wright spoke recently to Religion News Service. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why did you write this book?
A: I’ve always been curious about why people believe one thing rather than another. In America you can believe anything you want, unlike in a lot of other countries where there’s only one religion. So why would people be drawn to Scientology, one of the most esoteric and stigmatized religions?
Q: And what did you find?
A: Oftentimes people who go into Scientology are dealing with a personal problem. If you enter a Church of Scientology building you’ll be asked, “What is your ruin?” That is, what is standing in the way of your financial, spiritual and emotional success? And they will talk through things with you and offer a menu of courses designed to help. And many people do feel that they are helped by the courses or therapy.
Q: What does “going clear” mean for Scientologists?
A: L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had a theory that we have two minds. One is our rational, analytic mind. It’s like a computer: it remembers everything perfectly. What gets in the way of that is the “reactive” mind, which is full of fears and neuroses and traumas from our previous life and previous lifetimes. The object is to expunge those old painful memories, which he calls “engrams.” Once you eliminate the reactive mind you become “clear”: more intelligent, your reactions are quicker, your eyesight is better, you’re invulnerable to disease – near superhuman, in other words.
Q: And people believed this despite the fact that the promised benefits rarely come to pass, even for Hubbard?
A: The idea that you could acquire these powers was definitively an incentive and still is. In one of their magazines they have a section called “OT Powers,” in which upper-level Scientologists report what appear to be coincidences that they have experienced, like being able to change traffic lights to green and cure goldfish of sudden disease. None of them seem very remarkable, and it’s a very expensive course of treatment.
Q: You present a complex portrait of Hubbard, who seemed both desperately insecure and supremely self-confident. What drove him?
A: I think much of what he wanted was to cure himself. In the book I make an analogy to schizophrenia being called the “shaman sickness” in aboriginal cultures. These are people we would consider schizophrenics, but who perform a function in society and religion. Hubbard created this image of himself as a wounded warrior who couldn’t be healed by modern medicine, but healed himself and then went out to heal the community.
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Lawrence Wright talks to Religion News Service about his new book “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief.” RNS photo courtesy Alfred A. Knopf.
Download or purchase this photo. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.
Q: And yet his injuries and war record were largely fictional, according to your reporting.
A: Yes, exactly.
Q: Can you describe what you discovered about Scientology’s secret work camps in the U.S.?
A: There are re-education camps in different locations for Sea Org members (Scientology’s clergy) who have offended the leader or committed some infraction against the Church of Scientology. On one of them, Gold Base, there’s a place called “the hole”: two double-wide trailers married together, where people are sent, often without being told of their crimes.
In 2004, (church leader) David Miscavige cleared away all the furniture and sent top executives to stay there, some for years. An elderly man who was the president of the church (a nominal post) was in the hole for seven years. Mike Rinder, Scientology’s (former) international spokesman, was placed in the hole. Occasionally they pulled him out, put a tuxedo on him and sent him to a gala to give a speech. Then he went back in the hole.
Q: Why hasn’t the government done anything about this?
A: At one point the FBI told my sources, former Scientologists, that they were planning a raid on Gold Base. They were going to open the hole and liberate the people there. But my sources told the FBI not to bother. The people held in the hole would only tell them that everything was sunlight and seashells there – that they were there for their own good. There are some people who actually escaped from the Sea Orgs but who went back. Other times they would be tracked down and brought back by a crew that is trained to follow and find people who have fled. They are very good at finding you; and when they do, you are likely going back into confinement for a long time.
Q: Why would someone willingly go back, or agree to stay in those camps?
A: Well, put yourself in their place. Many of them joined as children, some were born into it. Many, if not all, of their friends and family are Scientologists. If you left, they would never talk to you again. They are only paid $50 a week, so they don’t have any income or education to fall back on. Young Scientologists don’t really get any formal education. Their knowledge of the outside world is very restricted and they are taught to distrust outsiders. From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly. You’re also taught that your salvation is at stake and if you bring disgrace on Scientology nothing could be worse. To some extent, they are not being held against their will; it’s their will that is holding them there.
Q: You detail some pretty serious violations of child labor laws by Scientology. Why isn’t law enforcement stepping in?
A: I don’t know. I mean, the church says it’s not in violation, but I look at those labor laws and it seems pretty clear. I can tell you that law enforcement agencies are reluctant to get involved with the Church of Scientology. The church is surrounded by high-powered lawyers. If you are going to take on the Church of Scientology, whether it’s the FBI or the IRS or the sheriff of Riverside County, it’s a mighty task, and the agencies know that very well.
Q: For example, they completely cowed the IRS to get their religious organization exemption.
A: And this is a rather small organization that could inflict so much trouble on the IRS. I don’t know what the IRS used to judge that Scientology was a religion. A group of accountants and lawyers is not the best-equipped body to disentangle what a religion is, but the circumstances surrounding the tax exemption are pretty alarming. The church filed a barrage of lawsuits, had private investigators tail IRS agents and smear their careers. The reason behind the deal for the IRS was so that the harassment and lawsuits would stop.
Q: Scientologists have a history of surveilling, threatening, and suing journalists too, sometimes even framing them for crimes. Are you concerned about that?
A: My eyes were open to start with, but it was such an amazing story I couldn’t resist myself. So far the church has published one surveillance photo of me interviewing a source, but I think they were more interested in the source than me. I have received stern letters from the Church of Scientology and their lawyers and from the lawyers of celebrities mentioned in the book, but no one has sued me. And I’m very confident in the sourcing and material in the book.
Q: David Miscavige, the leader of the Church of Scientology, comes across as a violent, abusive person in your book. How different would the church be if he weren’t leading it?
A: You have to give him credit, he saved Scientology. If not for the tax exemption he managed to get, Scientology would be out of business. They owed a billion dollars in back taxes, and he salvaged the church from certain death. I know that a lot of people who have left the church blame him for moving away from L. Ron Hubbard’s original ideas, but the difference is that Miscavige grew up in, and is a product of, the Church of Scientology. It’s hard to know how it would be different without him.
Q: If people know anything about Scientology, they likely know about celebrity members like Tom Cruise. You write that fame is actually a spiritual value for the church. How so?
A: L. Ron Hubbard set up the Church of Scientology in Hollywood in 1954 for a reason. He understood that celebrity was increasingly a feature of American public life, and celebrities themselves were going to be worshipped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The Celebrity Center in Hollywood went out to court exemplary figures that Scientology could use as front men. Early on, the church published an ideal list of catches, including Bob Hope, John Ford, Marlene Dietrich and Walt Disney. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow.
Q: Do you think celebrity members like John Travolta and Cruise know about the abuses perpetuated by church leaders?
A: If they don’t, I think it must be willful blindness on their part. It’s not as if people in the public don’t know, or that you can’t find out about these abuses. It’s easy to do. But Scientologists are trained to avoid noticing any kind of public criticism, and I think that’s especially true of celebrities. The are coddled and given special treatment – that’s a perk of being a celebrity in the Church of Scientology – and they are reluctant to give that up, and in the process they are overlooking very serious abuses.
The Church of Scientology transformed this former bank in downtown Clearwater, Fla., into part of its headquarters, where church members receive spiritual counseling. Religion News Service photo courtesy of Church of Scientology.
Q: Your write that no one has receive more material benefits from the church – motorcycles, cars, house repairs, etc. – than Tom Cruise. Is he, then, implicated in the church’s misdeeds?
A: I think he bears a moral responsibility to look into the abuses. The public sees him as the primary spokesperson for the Church of Scientology. The church has exploited him and rewarded him, and because of his membership, more people have heard about and joined the church. There are not many avenues for change in the Church of Scientology, and Tom Cruise might be able to affect more change than anyone else.
Q: You write that Miscavige watches videos of Cruise’s secret confessions at night with a glass of whiskey. That alone might draw some response from Cruise. Has he reacted to your book yet?
A: His lawyer weighed in and said Tom Cruise thought the book was very boring.
Q: The church has been a bit more critical, calling your book “error-filled” and “unsubstantiated.” How do you respond to that?
A: I spoke to more than 250 people, many of them current or former Scientologists, and some of them were at the top levels of the church. Starting with The New Yorker (Wright wrote an article about Scientology for the magazine in 2011), we sent more than 1,000 fact checking questions to the church. Since the article came out in The New Yorker, we’ve sent more than 150 fact checking questions to the church. We received only partial responses, some of them very hostile. I tried to present the church’s perspective as much as possible.
KRE/LEM END BURKE
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