RFK Daughter Kerry Kennedy To Speak at Hollywood Scientology Salon
This is just about as weird as it gets. I’ve just been sent a copy of an invite to top Scientology couple Anne Archerand Terry Jastrow’s Hollywood home. It seems as though on May 1 the Jastrows are hosting a salon at which Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy Jr and ex wife of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, will address the crowd. Kerry Kennedy is the featured speaker.
The other hosts are all Scientologists including composer Mark Isham and actress Kelly Preston (aka Mrs. Travolta). Archer and Jastrow have held this kind of salon before, and I’ve reported on it. The invitation says it’s for a group called Artists for Human Rights, which is a Scientology group. Kennedy is coming a spokesperson for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, named for her late father.
The story was first reported by the indefatigable Tony Ortega on his website, www.tonyortega.org.
Kennedy is still awaiting word about her car crash last July 2012 in Westchester County. She claimed she’d mistakenly taken an Ambien and had fallen asleep at the wheel of her car. It hasn’t been determined yet whether will she stand trial. You would think Kennedy savvy would have steered her clear from Scientology. Archer’s son, Tommy Davis, was the chief celebrity wrangler at Scientology for years. But in the last couple of years, Davis and his wife–Katie Holmes’ former Scientology minder Jessica Feshbach–have disappeared from day to day operations.Kennedy could easily had read Lawrence Wright’s new book, “Going Clear,” or the new book by Jenna Miscavige Hill– niece of the cult’s leader, David Miscavige– to understand the countless acts against human rights perpetuated by the organization. Why she’s going, and carry the RFK Foundation name with her, remains a mystery. As a devout Kennedy Catholic, she may have some questions for these Scientologists about Thetan, the afterlife, aliens, and where the others who’ve disappeared have gone.
Who Bought J.R.’s Condo? “Dallas” Star Home Goes to Scientology Real-Estate Arm
- WRITTEN BY RICK COHEN
- CREATED ON MONDAY, 08 APRIL 2013 14:20
April 5, 2013; Source: Ventura County Star
Some nonprofits have the resources to do some big real-estate deals. In Ojai, California, the nine-bedroom, five-fireplace, three-swimming-pool, 23,000-square-foot home of the late Larry Hagman, who starred as “J.R. Ewing” in Dallas, has been sold for $5 million to the nonprofit Social Betterment Properties International, though it had originally been listed for $6,495,000. The nonprofit paid cash.
How does a nonprofit that hasn’t filed a Form 990 since 2007, a year when it reported no contributions, gifts, and grants and only $59,403 in 2006, fork over $5 million in cash for a Ventura County mansion that Hagman called “Heaven” – and for what purposes? We don’t quite know, except that the organization might now be a church rather than a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. SBPI was created as a real-estate acquisition, development, and management arm of the church of Scientology, the religion founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.SBPI’s 2003 990 states the tax-exempt purpose of the organization as to “acquire, develop, and maintain buildings and other real estate utilized by social betterment organizations carrying out programs that utilize technology and methods developed by L. Ron Hubbard and that are associated with and supported by the Scientology religion.” While churches are not prohibited from filing 990s, they are not required to do so. Wholly owned by the church of Scientology, SBPI appears to have opted out of the 990 filing process, denying the public access to this entity’s real-estate activities.
Although the organization showed six- and seven-figure operating deficits in 2006 and 2007, because of its ownership of substantial real estate, as of 2007, SBPI had a fund balance of $41,243,376. As part of the Scientology Church’s empire, SBPI probably had access to substantial liquid assets to make this quick purchase regardless of what was presented in its now extremely dated Form 990s. Among SBPI’s real-estate holdings are facilities used as detox centers, which some in the press have described simply as places for drug detox and counseling, though – as with Narconon in Oklahoma – the detoxification that Scientology talks about is a process using Hubbard’s technology to rid people not only of drug usage, but many other kinds of behaviors that don’t fit the Scientology worldview and merit detoxification.
Given the extensive real-estate holdings of Scientology around the world, SBPI is probably not the only entity holding and managing Scientology properties. This isn’t an issue specific to Scientology, but there seems to be an important rationale for public disclosure of the resources and assets of religious institutions that are eligible for charitable contributions just like 501(c)(3) public charities. Since 2007, all we know is that SPBI’s portfolio has increased by the 32-acre home of the J.R. Ewing. We should know more. –Rick Cohen
Exploring 'the Prison of Belief'
By Steve Bennett, Staff writer
Updated 12:45 pm, Friday, April 5, 2013
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Texas Book Festival/San Antonio Edition
What: Literary festival featuring more than 60 authors in book presentations, interviews, panel discussions and signings. Also children's and cooking activities, food and live music. Books on sale at site.
Who: Authors include Stephen Harrigan, Sandra Cisneros, Ed Whitacre, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Reyna Grande, James L. Haley, Domingo Martinez, D.T. Max, Joe Nick Patoski, Esmerelda Santiago and Carmen Tafolla.
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday
Where: Central Library, 600 Soledad, and Southwest School of Art, 300 Augusta
How much: Free and open to the public
More information:www.saplf.org/bookfestival.html
Growing up in Dallas in the early '60s, Lawrence Wright became passionate about religion. Not holy-roller fanatical, but he knew that faith could be a powerful force.
“My father taught Sunday school forever at the First Methodist Church in Dallas,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, who headlines Saturday's inaugural Texas Book Festival/San Antonio Edition. “It's not like the household was super pious, but I got involved in (the youth ministry program) Young Life when I was in high school, and I got very interested in religion.”
So when the Tulane University graduate started in journalism — he began his writing career in 1971 at the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville — it was inevitable that religion would come to play a major role in his work.
“As a reporter, I've always been humbled by the power of religious belief to transform individuals and societies for good and for ill,” Wright, 65, said in a recent telephone interview from his Austin office. “So it's striking to me that as journalists we spend so much time talking about politics, which is important, but people can hold strong political beliefs without actually having that affect their behavior. It's not so easy to do that when those beliefs are religious in nature.”
A playwright and screenwriter — he co-wrote the 1998 film “The Siege” starring Denzel Washington — Wright is primarily a journalist, a New Yorker staff writer whose books include 1988's “In the New World: Growing Up With America, 1960-1984,” “Saints & Sinners” (1993), “Remembering Satan” (1994) and 2000's “God's Favorite.”
His last two books have dealt with religious extremism: “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” won the 2006 Pulitzer for nonfiction, while his latest book, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief,” published in January, is an exhaustively researched and meticulously reported attempt to make sense of one of the most secretive organizations in the world — as well as to get inside the fevered mind of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and his successor, current Scientology leader David Miscavige.
“I was interested in Scientology for a long time because it's such an esoteric body of beliefs,” Wright said. “Like most people who have wondered about Scientology, I was curious as to why such notable personalities, especially in Hollywood, would be drawn to that religion. But I needed a way to write about it. I needed a character who could take us into that world.”
That turned out to be Paul Haggis, director of the Academy Award-winning film “Crash.” A Scientologist for 34 years, Haggis dropped out of the church and began to speak his mind about the inner workings of the organization. Wright profiled him in the New Yorker in a long, fascinating piece that won a 2012 National Magazine Award. It was the basis for “Going Clear,” which is a Scientology term for reaching a certain enlightened status.
“I had talked to David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, previously about writing about Scientology,” Wright said. “We were certainly aware of the possible toll it would take on me and the magazine. The examples were very much on our minds of the sacrifices other organizations and reporters had made, and the attacks upon them. But it was an intriguing story. When Paul dropped out, he was exactly the kind of person I was interested in because he was a part of the Hollywood celebrity set. But he was also a very intelligent, creative, skeptical personality, the kind of person that I thought the reader might identify with.”
It's an understatement to say that the church, notoriously litigious, was not pleased with Wright's work.
“There were some things I really didn't anticipate,” he said, “and one was the tremendous amount of fear that people in Scientology and recently out of it had in terms of talking about the church and their beliefs. The church had secured non-disclosure agreements among many top officials in the church. Foreclosing interviews could be really difficult. It was a clear attempt to block the flow of information.”
The church actively tried to discredit Wright and his work, setting up a website to attack him and getting its lawyers involved through making statements rebutting just about everything about the book.
“I had to deal with some pretty absurd statements that the church made about my work,” Wright said.
Colleagues came to his defense. Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for the Atlantic, told the Huffington Post that “there is no more careful reporter in the world than Larry, and no one who is as thorough and as indefatigable.”
Charles McGrath of the New York Times wrote that “Wright is known for his thoroughness and for his legal pads and his filing-card system, which in the computer age is as complicated and as antique as the historian Robert Caro's.”
“I am really old school,” Wright said. “And yet I've never found a better system.”
That classification system includes a massive file of note cards for research material and the hundreds of interviews Wright does for a book of “Going Clear's” scale. He also has two white boards in his office, one for characters (in different color inks) and the other for scenes.
“I think that in addition to strong characters, powerful scenes are what make a great narrative,” he said.
Hubbard, says Wright, is “one of the most interesting people I ever got to write about.”
“The contradictions in his narrative are fascinating because even if he made things up about himself, he lived a very vivid, large-scale life, which is in itself worth chronicling. I don't think there's any other person in history that went to the trouble that he did to explore his internal mechanism as extensively as he did. The thousand books that he wrote are in the Guiness Book of World Records for the most titles, and many of them are these interior soundings that really constitute the body of work that is Scientology.”
Twelve people told Wright that Miscavige had physically attacked them.
“He certainly has developed a reputation for being abusive,” Wright said. “But to give him credit, Scientology wouldn't exist without him because it was Miscavige who managed to get the tax exemption for the church in 1993.”
Despite having “a lot of money and a number of very fine lawyers,” the church is at a “crossroads,” Wright believes.
“In my opinion it's hemorraging members like crazy, and it can't endure if it continues to develop the reputation it has now,” he said.
sbennett@express-news.net
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/books/article/Exploring-the-Prison-of-Belief-4410207.php#ixzz2PqNckeqj
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