Bad news for anyone hoping Tom Cruise's $50 million lawsuit against In Touch and Life & Style magazines would mean tons of juicy details surfacing as they battled it out in public court.
TheWrap reports that Cruise's case against Bauer, the tabloid's publisher, has been moved to private mediation. While the move wasn't unexpected, it's somewhat disappointing, as a public trial was likely to air some dirty laundry on either side.
Cruise filed the defamation lawsuit against Bauer media in October, over a story that suggested the 50-year-old actor had abandoned his 6-year-old daughter Suri, since his divorce from actress Katie Holmes. Cruise's attorney, Bert Fields, called the story a "vicious lie," adding, "Tom is a caring father who dearly loves Suri. She's a vital part of his life and always will be. To say it in lurid headlines with a tearful picture of Suri is reprehensible."
Last month, Bauer's lawyers shot back, claiming their story was "substantially true," and requested a laundry list of information about Cruise's relationship with Suri -- including intimate details about the child's mental and emotional state following her parents’ separation and divorce.
At the time, it appeared as though Bauer's legal team planned to use the case as a way to expose more information on Cruise's role in the Church of Scientology, as well as any role the organization may have played in his decisions regarding his visitation and communication with Suri, as well as the history of all the lawsuits the actor has filed over the years.
Meanwhile, Cruise's legal team was expected to go after Bauer's "history of bigotry and hatred toward minority religious groups and their members," which was likely in reference to a report that claimed the German publisher holds assets, including at least one magazine appealing to neo-Nazis, and is involved in distributing Nazi-themed porn movies.
UPDATE: According to court documents filed on March 1, Cruise's lawsuit has been ordered to mediation, however, there is a chance the case could be heard in open court.
The actor's lawyer told The Huffington Post on Wednesday, that it's standard procedure to see if the case can first be worked out in private mediation, however the case is still scheduled to go to court in April 2014. Though it's possible the matter could be settled privately, Fields said he's "skeptical" about reaching a settlement with Bauer.
Review: ‘Going Clear’ offers harrowing look at Church of Scientology
In No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie’s excellent biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she observes that Smith’s boundless imagination would have served him well as a novelist.
The quote came back to me time and again as I read Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, an exhaustive look at the Church of Scientology.
Only unlike Smith, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard actually was a science fiction novelist, and a fairly successful one. Manic at the typewriter, Hubbard’s own imagination conjured new worlds and allows the church he founded to boast that he is one of the world’s most prolific writers.
Wright clearly wants us to see Hubbard’s fictional imagination at work in the cosmology of Scientology, which gets a good bit of attention in Going Clear. But it’s the real-life application of those ideas — abuse, imprisonment, slave wages and the debasement of even loyal church members — that occupies the vast majority of the 372 pages (not counting extensive endnotes and bibliography).
Of course, no church’s doctrines are immune from sounding insane to people not its adherents, who have not grown up in the faith or been around seemingly rational people who embrace it. A six-day creation of the entire universe, by a god who commands his followers not to murder but then directs them to genocide and even to sacrifice their own family members? A virgin birth, water changed into wine and a miraculous resurrection from the dead? To outsiders, these can easily sound like the fables of a people gazing about a very big, very mysterious universe and grasping for answers to the most basic questions. The fact that we still can’t answer them — despite supercolliders that can peer into the tiniest fragments of matter and super-telescopes than can peer billions of years into the past — shows the enduring appeal of religion of all stripes.
(Here, however, it must be said that while Scientology seeks to keep some of its more outlandish beliefs secret, revealing them only to initiates who have progressed to a certain level in the faith, other religions put their doctrines on full display. Roman Catholicism, certainly, has much for which to answer — the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pederasty scandal — but it preaches to believers and nonbelievers alike the whole enchilada every single Sunday.)
Wright’s exhaustive reporting, most of which is denied flatly by the church, a fact of which we’re repeatedly reminded in footnotes, portrays a religion that thrives based on the hard work of its true believers. But, he reports, those believers are often mistreated, punished for petty statements or thought crimes detected in “audits” on the church’s ubiquitous E-Meter. Punishments can include confinement in horrid conditions, hard labor for little or no pay, and — in some of the most shocking passages — beatings allegedly administered by the church’s current chief, David Miscavige. Those who turn on the church are subjected to intense persuasion to return. Those who investigate the church — whether lawyers seeking damages for clients or the United States government in the form of the Internal Revenue Service — are themselves investigated, intimidated and, in some cases, allegedly blackmailed, according to Wright.
Among the most ironic revelations, however, is this: Some who are subjected to the church’s harshest treatment don’t simply walk away. This is an astonishing thing to the reader, who might wonder why anyone would put up with the abuse Wright documents in his exhaustive reporting. But faith is a powerful thing, and fear of what happens in the afterlife to someone who has misbehaved in this one has filled more than a few pews in the history of religion. What the late atheist essayist Christopher Hitchens called “mind-forged manacles” are no less confining just because they may not really exist. Why else would an otherwise rational person sign a contract committing to one billion years of service, as Wright reports is required of members entering the Sea Organization, the backbone of Scientology?
Wright spends a good deal of time debunking some myths that have grown around Hubbard since his 1986 death, especially those surrounding his war record. That’s no doubt in part due to former church spokesman Tommy Davis’ remark — in a pivotal meeting between Scientology officials and editors of The New Yorker, for whom Wright was preparing a story — that the truth hinges upon it. If Hubbard wasn’t hurt in the war, injuries he allegedly cured using Scientology, then “the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore Scientology is based on a lie.”
Davis produced a document to prove Hubbard’s injuries, but Wright unearthed others to show that Hubbard applied for a pension, citing those very (unhealed) injuries as justification. Dueling versions of Hubbard’s military separation paperwork portray vastly different circumstances, and archivists at the military’s St. Louis records facility have denounced a church version supplied to The New Yorker as a forgery.
Is there an explanation? Always: Hubbard was in intelligence, and intelligence officers often have two sets of records. Sounds like an excellent plotline for a very compelling novel.
GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY, HOLLYWOOD & THE PRISON OF BELIEF, Lawrence Wright, Alfred A. Knopf 430 pages
What it was like growing up in Scientology
BabyCenter Guest Blogger
posted: March 7, 2013, 9:44 am
By Jenna Miscavige
I definitely didn’t grow up in anything you’d recognize as “traditional.”
I didn’t sleep in a warm house with food cooked at home by my mom. I didn’t have sleepovers with friends or a toy box, much less toys to fill it. My parents were high up in the Church of Scientology, and from the age of six, I lived in a boarding school for children of church executives. I shared a dorm room with seven other girls; it was attached to a bathroom we shared with the neighboring dorm which also held seven girls. Where a TV would have been (if it were allowed) instead stood a picture of the founder of Scientology, seemingly watching and judging our every move.
Our days often began with military close-order drilling, followed by four hours of labor, which could be anything from hauling rocks to build walls, to digging irrigation trenches, to painting the exteriors of the compound’s buildings. This was all part of the Church’s philosophy. We were taught that only criminals got things for free, and our work was our way of giving back, in exchange for the food and beds we were lucky to have.
We were taught that we were spiritual beings called “thetans” who lived many lifetimes, and had been around with different bodies for billions of years. For that reason, despite our child bodies, we were treated as adults, both physically and mentally. Imagine a group of seven-year-olds being spoken to as though they’re adults, and expected to work to that level! But this was my reality, the only one I knew.
My parents lived about 20 miles away, but I rarely saw them. In our belief system, no thetan or spirit could give birth to another thetan, and so the family dynamic was merely temporary and a distraction to our parents’ mission to save the world. And so we only saw them once a week for a few hours on Sunday morning before returning to “The Ranch” as the school was called. Those drives back were among my saddest moments as a child.
I left the Ranch when I was just 12, but things didn’t get any better. During the next six years I saw my mother twice and my father four times, usually for less than an hour. We went to school one day a week, and even that stopped when I was 16. We were too busy with our duties and working 14 hour days, seven days a week, for the Church.
Jenna Miscavige Hill grew up inside Scientology as the niece of its current leader, David Miscavige. Her new biography, “Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and my Harrowing Escape,” was on Amazon’s “best books of the month” list in February.
This is part one of two posts about growing up in Scientology. Part two will be published next week.
Photo: brianholcomb, Flickr
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