Why does everyone hate scientologists

How can someone excuse the behavior of a convicted felon for these actions? Considering his actions and threat, who was to know whether he would attempt to carry through with his threats? Yet this is not the first time potentially dangerous individuals have been inspired by Leah Remini. McMurtry plowed across the lobby before coming to a stop just short of a nursery. It was a miracle that no one was injured or killed, and it was only a stroke of luck that the nursery was empty.

Tracked down by police, McMurtry admitted to the crime and ranted about Scientology, including false claims made by Remini, as she had never previously had a single dealing with Scientology.

Silence on the incident. And spreading more anti-religious hate. A Chicago man, Andre Barkanov, pleaded guilty to threatening to assassinate the leader of the Church. Davis said that he had spoken to the friend who had allegedly abandoned Katy, and the friend had ended the relationship not because Katy was a lesbian but because Katy had lied about it.

Haggis, when informed of this account, laughed. If I were to make a statement on this, it would actually be more attention to the subject than if we leave it be. Haggis refused to let the matter drop. But I feel we shamed ourselves. Haggis sent this note six months before he resigned.

Because he stopped complaining, Davis felt that the issue had been laid to rest. But, far from putting the matter behind him, Haggis began his investigation into the church. The practice of disconnection is not unique to Scientology. The Amish, for example, cut themselves off from apostates, including their own children; some Orthodox Jewish communities do the same.

Rennard had disconnected from her parents twice. When she was a young child, her stepfather had got the family involved with Scientology. Like many active members of Scientology, they had kept money in an account in their case, twenty-five hundred dollars for future courses they intended to take.

In the early nineties, Rennard wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters; she was informed that she could talk to her parents again.

A decade later, however, she went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and was told that the previous ruling no longer applied. The church recommended that she take a course called P.

She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. Still, nothing changed. The church prescribes a seven-step course of rehabilitation, called A to E, for penitents seeking to get back into its good graces, which includes returning debts and making public declarations of error.

Her parents, worried that they would also be cut off from their grandson, agreed to perform community service. A senior official counselled her to agree to have her parents formally branded as S. After all that, they continued, a church adjudicator had told them to hand out three hundred copies of L. They had declined. Rennard had to hire an attorney. Eventually, the church relented. She was summoned to a church mission in Santa Monica and shown a statement rescinding the ruling that her parents were S.

Tommy Davis sent me some policy statements that Hubbard had made about disconnection in Scientology defectors are full of tales of forcible family separations, which the church almost uniformly denies.

Two former leaders in the church, Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, told me that families are sometimes broken apart. In their cases, their wives chose to stay in the church when they left. The wives, and the church, denounce Rathbun and Rinder as liars.

A few days after sending the resignation letter to Tommy Davis, Haggis came home from work to find nine or ten of his Scientology friends standing in his front yard.

He invited them in to talk. Anne Archer was there with Terry Jastrow, her husband, an actor turned producer and director. Everyone wanted to see if there could be some kind of resolution. His friends could have served as an advertisement for Scientology—they were wealthy high achievers with solid marriages, who embraced the idea that the church had given them a sense of well-being and the skills to excel.

Scientologists are trained to believe in their persuasive powers and the need to keep a positive frame of mind. They all knew about his financial support of the church and the occasions when he had spoken out in its defense.

Isham was frustrated. Of all the friends present, Isham was the closest to Haggis. Isham used Scientology to analyze the situation. By adopting a tone just above it—Anger—Isham hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged.

Haggis listened patiently. A fundamental tenet of Scientology is that differing points of view must be fully heard and acknowledged. When his friends finished, however, Haggis had his own set of grievances.

Amy Scobee had been an executive in the Celebrity Centre network. One by one, they had disappeared from Scientology, and it had never occurred to Haggis to ask where they had gone. The defectors told the newspaper that Miscavige was a serial abuser of his staff. Tom De Vocht, a defector who had been a manager at the Clearwater spiritual center, told the paper that he, too, had been beaten by Miscavige; he said that from to he had witnessed Miscavige striking other staff members as many as a hundred times.

Rathbun, Rinder, and De Vocht all admitted that they had engaged in physical violence themselves. Amy Scobee said that nobody challenged the abuse because people were terrified of Miscavige. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you. Assessing the truthfulness of such inflammatory statements—made by people who deserted the church or were expelled—was a challenge for the newspaper, which has maintained a special focus on Scientology.

Clearwater is twenty miles northwest of downtown St. In , six years before he defected, Rathbun told the paper that he had never seen Miscavige hit anyone.

Much of the alleged abuse took place at the Gold Base, a Scientology outpost in the desert near Hemet, a town eighty miles southeast of Los Angeles.

Haggis visited the Gold Base only once, in the early eighties, when he was about to direct his Scientology commercial. According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected Scientology leaders to instill aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning him in to the Hole—a pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base. According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that everyone was going to play musical chairs.

Only the last person standing would be allowed to stay on the base. They had no money, no credit cards, no telephones. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the game, Miscavige had airplane reservations made for them. He said that buses were going to be leaving at six in the morning. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room was nakedly clear. Tommy Davis told me that a musical-chairs episode did occur.

He explained that Miscavige had been away from the Gold Base for some time, and when he returned he discovered that in his absence many jobs had been reassigned. Jefferson Hawkins, a former Sea Org member and church executive who worked with Haggis on the rejected Dianetics ad campaign, told me that Miscavige had struck or beaten him on five occasions, the first time in Miscavige summoned him to a meeting where a few dozen members were seated on one side of a table; Miscavige sat by himself on the other side.

He knocks me back against a cubicle wall and starts battering my face. Get up! You can go from life to life to life without being cognizant of what is going on. Nobody who is a believer wants to lose that. Hawkins told me that if a Sea Org member sought outside help he would be punished, either by being declared a Suppressive Person or by being sent off to do manual labor, as Hawkins was made to do after Miscavige beat him. Two members of Anonymous have pleaded guilty to participating in a attack on a Scientology Web site.

The church provided me with eleven statements from Scientologists, all of whom said that Miscavige had never been violent. One of them, Yael Lustgarten, said that she was present at the meeting with Hawkins and that the attack by Miscavige never happened. After reading the St. Rathbun had been making ends meet by writing freelance articles for local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark. I explained the whole culture. Haggis called several other former Scientologists he knew well.

One of them said that he had escaped from the Gold Base by driving his car—an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through a wooden fence. The defector said that he had scars on his forehead from the incident. Still others had been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons.

The church would be very unhappy if you hire me. Beghe joined Scientology in He told Haggis that, in the late nineties, he began having emotional problems, and the church recommended auditing and coursework.

In retrospect, he felt that it had done no good. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution.

But now the situation was reversed. But, as he continued his investigation, he became increasingly disturbed. Petersburg Times series, in the Scientology magazine Freedom. It included an annotated transcript of conversations that had taken place between the reporters and representatives of the church, including Tommy Davis and his wife, Jessica Feshbach.

At one point in the transcribed conversations, Davis reminded the reporters that Scobee had been expelled from the church leadership because of an affair. The reporters responded that she had denied having sexual contact outside her marriage. I believe there were five. Such confessions are supposed to be confidential. Scientology denies that it obtained the information this way, and Davis produced an affidavit, signed by Scobee, in which she admits to having liaisons.

Scobee denies committing adultery, and says that she did not write the affidavit; she says that she signed it in the hope of leaving the church on good terms, so that she could stay in touch with relatives.

In his letter to Davis, Haggis said that he was worried that the church might look through his files to smear him, too. At his house, Haggis finished telling his friends what he had learned. He suggested that they should at least examine the evidence. Many stories on the site are from men and women who joined the Sea Org before turning eighteen. For Hill and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the Sea Org, leaving them especially ill-prepared, they say, for coping with life outside the church.

The stories Haggis found on the Internet of children drafted into the Sea Org appalled him. My God, it horrified me! Many Sea Org volunteers find themselves with no viable options for adulthood.

Payment is required in order to leave in good standing. Unmentioned was the fact that this would be the last time most of them ever spoke to Haggis. Petersburg Times. Davis and other church officials told Haggis that Miscavige had not beaten his employees; his accusers, they said, had committed the violence. You think I would put up with it? Haggis was shocked. In October, , Marty Rathbun called Haggis and asked if he could publish the resignation letter on his blog.

Haggis was in Pittsburgh, shooting his picture. The next morning, the story was in newspapers around the world. At the time Haggis was doing his research, the F. In December, , Tricia Whitehill, a special agent from the Los Angeles office, flew to Florida to interview former members of the church in the F.

Amy Scobee spoke to the F. Whitehill and Valerie Venegas, the lead agent on the case, also interviewed former Sea Org members in California. One of them was Gary Morehead, who had been the head of security at the Gold Base; he left the church in In thirteen years, he estimates, he and his security team brought more than a hundred Sea Org members back to the base.

When emotional, spiritual, or psychological pressure failed to work, Morehead says, physical force was sometimes used to bring escapees back. The church says that blow drills do not exist.

Whitehill and Venegas worked on a special task force devoted to human trafficking. The laws regarding trafficking were built largely around forced prostitution, but they also pertain to slave labor. Under federal law, slavery is defined, in part, by the use of coercion, torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, and psychological abuse.

Those conditions echo the testimony of many former Sea Org members who lived at the Gold Base. Bruce Hines, the defector turned research physicist, says that he was confined to R. He recalls that the properties were heavily guarded and that anyone who tried to flee would be tracked down and subjected to further punishment. Davis says that Sea Org members enter R.

They had both joined as children. Claire became a member of the Sea Org at the age of sixteen, and was assigned to the Gold Base.

The security apparatus at the Gold Base intimidated Claire. She says she was rarely allowed even a telephone call to her mother.

Claire met Marc Headley, also a teen-ager, soon after her arrival. In Scientology, the auditor bears a significant responsibility for the progress of his subject. Claire and Marc fell in love, and married in The church denies that it pressures members to terminate pregnancies. Lucy James, a former Scientologist who had access to Sea Org personnel records, says that she knows of dozens of cases in which members were pressed to have abortions.

In , Marc Headley says, he was punched by Miscavige during an argument. He and his wife quit. The church calls Marc Headley dishonest, claiming that he kept seven hundred dollars in profits after being authorized to sell Scientology camera equipment; Headley says that shipping costs and other expenses account for the discrepancy.

In , the Headleys filed their suits, which maintained that the working conditions at the Gold Base violated labor and human-trafficking laws. The court also indicated that the Headleys were technically free to leave the Gold Base. The Headleys have appealed the rulings. Defectors also talked to the F.

Claire Headley says that, when she was in Scientology, Miscavige had five stewards and two chefs at his disposal; he also had a large car collection, including a Saleen Mustang, similar to one owned by Cruise, and six motorcycles. Former Sea Org members report that Miscavige receives elaborate birthday and Christmas gifts from Scientology groups around the world. One year, he was given a Vyrus C3 4V, a motorcycle with a retail price of seventy thousand dollars.

By contrast, Sea Org members typically receive fifty dollars a week. Often, this stipend is docked for small infractions, such as failing to meet production quotas or skipping scripture-study sessions. I recently spoke with two sources in the F. They assured me that the case remains open. For a survivor of any type of abuse, being told it didn't happen or that it wasn't abuse is hugely damaging and can lead to fewer people coming forward about abuse in the future.

It also allows future abuse to happen and go unnoticed, basically giving the attacker the green light to continue harming their victim. A psychologist chimed in on the AMA and asked about mental health treatment in Scientology.

She said she had heard psychology is looked down upon in the religion, but it turns out it's flat out denied. They promote that you can heal your psycho-sematic issues with their 'technology.

They will prevent people from getting the real medical help that they need. And in some cases have caused suicides because of it. Scientology is mentally abusive because we are all taught that we are responsible for everything. Since we know that mental illness is quite real and it can even have physical symptoms , it's scary to hear that the church denies people the treatment they need.

While we don't know of any confirmed suicides because of Scientology denying people mental health treatment, we don know that depression can be linked to suicidal thoughts and attempts. Since Leah wrote Scientology made her think of non-church members as bad people, leaving the church allowed Leah to better accept other forms of religion. Phone number? Please scroll down and read this document.

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