How Tom Cruise saved me from Scientology

The explosion of interest in Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear has brought the role played by Scientology's celebrity flag-bearers back into focus.

It prompted Sea Org veteran John Duignan to send Infinite Complacency this extract from his latest book project.

John Duignan © Lisa Tiffany

I suppose I should thank him. It was Tom Cruise, after all, who finally convinced me to walk away from Scientology.

Back then, Cruise and I had something important in common. We were both fanatical adherents of the Church of Scientology.

Otherwise the differences in the lifestyles that defined us could not be more stark.

Finally, in 2005, my 22 years of life in the Sea Organization, the very core of Scientology – its elite, communal-living, unquestioning, ecclesiastical hierarchy – came to an abrupt end.

And that is mainly down to the Top Gun star.

Before that, it had been Tom who had kept me clinging to the last threads of my shaken faith.

I had willingly absorbed the abuse, insane work schedules, the pittance we were paid and awful living conditions.

Why? Because Tom’s dedication and his courting of politicians, presidents, movie stars and film industry executives – including the likes of Spielberg – promised a bright new future for our much-maligned movement.

But he went and spoiled it.

I could forgive him the South Park episode that made a fool of both him and Scientology.

I even forgave him his manic display on Oprah Winfrey's show, jumping up and down on the couch, in a scene endlessly lampooned on the Internet

But I could not forgive him standing up on that stage in Saint Hill, Southern England – next to David Miscavige, our diminutive dictator – and telling me that he was more dedicated, worked harder and suffered more for the Scientology cause than me and my downtrodden Sea Org comrades.

I lived with my compatriots on an average of £10.00 for a 140-hour work week.

That's right: 140 hours – that's not a typo.

We were used to travelling back and forth from our overcrowded communal housing in overcrowded, beat up, old, Ford mini-buses. When in October 2004 Tom and his entourage arrived at Scientology’s UK base, it was in rather more style.

He swept down the drive of Saint Hill Manor in leafy West Sussex, in a gleaming Mercedes E500. When he stepped out of the car, he was dressed in a hand-crafted suit and Italian leather shoes that screamed cosseted opulence.

In contrast, my rumpled looking Scientology interpretation of a naval officer’s uniform, with its worn, shiny patches, told a story of desperation, depredation and intimidation.

Cheap, cracked shoe leather and off-white shirts bore witness to sleepless work stints. Another 24-hour shift where the brass alternately cajoled and threatened their Sea Org subordinates to rocket their sales and delivery statistics.

And we in turn would pass it down the ranks.

Our pale, pinched faces yelled down phone lines demanding ever-more production from browbeaten staff working from cold, leaky buildings in London, Manchester, Plymouth, Birmingham and Edinburgh.

Our already frantic work mode had been driven up several notches as we rushed to make ready Saint Hill base before the arrival of Miscavige, the “Chairman of the Board” – COB.

The mention of COB struck terror into the hearts of Sea Org members however senior. This man wielded absolute power over us. He was a tightly wound spring exuding a malevolent air of barely suppressed violence.¹

His personal staff included drivers, a medical doctor, stylists and armed body guards. Beyond these, he had his very own corporate entity known as RTC, the Religious Technology Center.²

Sea Org members of this unit enforced his power and authority. They were recruited from a pool of second- and third-generation Scientology and Sea Org children. They had to be young and physically perfect. They were fanatical in their allegiance to Miscavige.

Even the most senior executives feared them, because these people were COB by extension.³

Several layers of bureaucracy pressed down on us to ready the Saint Hill Castle, its grounds and its people in time for an annual showcase event. The evening was designed to impress the great and the good of Scientology, and so doing extract breathtaking sums from them that would end up in a murky bank account in a tax-free and audit-free island in the Dutch Antilles.

Attendance numbers had to be big, up on previous years, to give a feeling of success and expansion. This impression helped soften people up to donate massive amounts to the fund known as “The War Chest” to fund campaigns against Scientology's enemies.

To that end, we had additional cleaning, painting duties and even the construction of a huge, temporary, hangar-like auditorium for the event.

And we still had to complete our regular duties, phoning our way through an interminable list of thousands of fanatical believers, book buyers and casual contacts.

And all the while we were being berated and terrorised by a complement of Scientology top brass who had descended on us from corporate headquarters in California – and from Freewinds, the 40-year old Sea Org cruise ship based in the Caribbean island of Curacao.

By the night of the big event we were burned out.

I was in particularly bad shape. I was on call 24/7 and had managed about six hours sleep over the preceding week.

And yes, you read that correctly: six hours sleep in a week.

We still had a full weekend of events to get through – because we were not the guests. We had to do all the work: from cleaning to security and everything in between. And after that, we would have to face a nerve-wracking week of inspection by Miscavige and his retinue of brass.

But attendance at the main event was mandatory.

This was a black-tie affair where Miscavige reeled off statistics and anecdotes demonstrating Scientology's unstoppable growth across the planet, and paraded the stars of Scientology Corporate growth.

And this is when Tom Cruise was introduced to the awestruck gathering. 

"Were you there? What did you do?" Tom Cruise, Saint Hill, 2004

He struck me as cold, arrogant. He berated us about his dedication. He echoed Miscavige in ordering us to greater efforts: more work, less self-indulgence.

Here was this multi-millionaire, glowing with carefully cultivated health. His private Gulfstream jet had deposited him beside his Mercedes and then he had been driven to the exclusive South Lodge Hotel to rest after his long journey.

And here I was, 22 years of sweat and tears behind me, virtually penniless and crushed by exhaution. I considered myself pretty damned dedicated.

Well, as I said, I suppose I should thank him.

Even before Cruise's speech, I had already begun to have doubts about Scientology.⁴ But after a few months ruminating over this insulated, privileged Hollywood star and his sense of entitlement, I left Scientology forever.⁵

During those first weeks after I fled Hubbard and his minions, while I was ducking and diving around the seedier areas of Birmingham to avoid the cultists who were hunting me, I sought help in Catholic, Anglican and Unitarian churches.

At best they gave me a pat on the back and sent me on my way. They did not want to know.

So I made my own way and eventually became a mask-wearing Anonymous campaigner, an author and a vocal critic of Hubbard and his cult.

I also gave up on that crowd of berobed old men claiming that they can intercede between my carnal humanity and divinity. I finally rejected the fabrications sold me by priests, preachers and gurus. I rejected those brief transcendent moments of religious ecstasy and revelation.

It was a coldly liberating moment: but it was hard won.

John Duignan spent 22 years in the Sea Organization stationed in Europe, Australia, Canada, the US and United Kingdom. He fled the cult in 2006 and wrote a book about his experience. The Complex, published in Dublin in 2008 by Merlin Press. This article is an extract from his as-yet unpublished second book, ‘Gullible’s Travels’. John lives in Ireland and is a writer by profession.

1   John and his colleagues had good reason to be afraid: Miscavige has a history of assaulting his lieutenants, as reported here back in 2009. See Accusing Miscavige, The Case Against Miscavige and A History of Violence. (All notes added by the site editor.)

2   The Religious Technology Center (RTC) is where, according to most observers, the real power in Scientology lies. If Miscavige is known as COB, it is because he is Chairman of the Board of the RTC.

3   Hubbard, in his day, had a similar entourage, teenager girls known as the Messengers, who wielded the same kind of power – and inspired the same kind of fear.

4   We asked about that and John explained that he had happened on an abridged paperback edition of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Hubbard, in one of his Student Hat lectures, had claimed to have read the full six-volume version one time he was having trouble sleeping.

“I had been most impressed. Happening upon the much shorter and simplified 1963 paperback collapsed his claim: I read enough of the paperback over the weekend to prove to myself that I could have given the same lecture were I called to do so.

“The shock was the realization that Hubbard would lie; edit the truth to suit his needs.

“This being the case then, what else was he lying about?”

You can find the passage in question in Hubbard's “Organization And Ethics” May 18, 1965 lecture: Saint Hill Special Briefing Course given at East Grinstead (SHSBC-424).

5   John isn't the only Sea Org member who was offended by the way Miscavige honoured Cruise at the 2005 ceremony, praising him to the skies and awarding him a “Freedom Medal of Valor”; and by the way Cruise lectured Sea Org veterans on how to be good Scientologists. Peter Bonyai expressed similar feelings in his memoir, Money, Power, Servitude:

Even as a dedicated Sea Org member, I felt his whole story was a gigantic insult to all hard-working Sea Org members. I had been working day and night for the Church for the last seven years, enduring all the extreme production demands, yelling, humiliation in the name of greater good etc. And then Tom Fucking Cruise gets a medal, despite the fact that he was only disseminating over the previous 1 or 2 years. By the way, I never really liked Tom Cruise — he was a kind of a symbol of what was wrong with mainstream US culture. He was not even a Sea Org member, just a public Scientologist, whom we considered loser dilettantes for not taking real responsibility for clearing the planet.

You can find my review of the book over at Tony Ortega's Underground Bunker.

R.J. Ellory: a reluctant Scientologist?

British crime writer R.J. Ellory's 27-year-long association with Scientology made the news in France earlier this month. But how committed is he?¹

Now here's a twist in the tale: English thriller writer R.J. Ellory, who only last year had to apologise for an egregious lapse of professional ethics, turns out to be a long-time Scientologist.

British crime writer R.J. Ellory

Britain's Daily Telegraph reported in September 2012 that Roger Jon Ellory had been caught using “sock-puppet” accounts to write glowing reviews for his own books. As one wag at the New York Times put it a couple of days later: “His Biggest Fan was Himself”.

That might have been laughed off as a sad combination of vanity and desperation – except he used the same trick to rubbish books written by his rivals. Ellory was forced to issue an apology regretting his “lapse of judgment”.

In December, the Telegraph came back with a second helping of humble pie.

This time, he had been caught trying to edit unflattering references to the previous scandal from his Wikipedia page. Wikipedia confirmed to the Telegraph that it had banned Ellory from any further intervention (just as they did to Scientology back in 2009).

A page archived at Wikipedia, where editors exchanged information on the controversy offers an insight into their editing process – and Ellory's growing frustration at not being able to control it.

Media coverage of the affair was extremely misleading, he protested to the editors:

The facts are very simple, and - as you say - I have publicly apologised for this. Over a span of ten years, ten reviews were left on amazon, either self-penned or penned by a family member, one for each book I have published to date. Two negative reviews were left by me, and only two. The newspaper reports have created the apparency that I had used multiple false names and accounts to post 'dozens, if not hundreds' of reviews. This is entirely false...

But as one bemused Wiki-editor observed: “The impression that I got was that Roger Ellory... genuinely believed that he owned 'his page, his life, his bio, his career...'”

The same editor added: “I want to assume good faith, though this may have been feigned. This would explain the bizarre and frustrating one-way conversations and not being able to get through to Ellory.”²

Now French journalist Julien Bisson has unearthed the extent of Ellory's involvement in Scientology in an article for Lire magazine. The French monthly ran the piece in its April edition (which, appropriately enough, was devoted to crime fiction).

Lire broke the story 

Such is Ellory's profile over here, the news weekly L'Express picked up the story, running Bisson's original article and adding his interview with Ellory.

Ellory told Bisson that he had got into Scientology in 1986 after his brother introduced him to the “purification program”, which had helped him with his drugs problem. He had decided to give it a try because he too, had problems with drugs, he said.

“I stopped taking drugs immediately, and I honestly believe that if I hadn’t done that program I would have been dead before I was 25,” he added. (Our thanks to Bisson for the original English version of his quotes.)

Ellory is presumably referring to the Purification Rundown – the controversial Hubbard-devised programme involving aerobic exercise, long sessions in the sauna and massive amounts of vitamins. Ellory said the “program”, as he called it, helped people with drugs problems make spiritual progress.

The Rundown, of course, is a core part of the service offered at the we're-completely-independent-of-Scientology drug rehab service, Narconon, currently in meltdown across north America because of a series of deaths there.³

In the interview, Ellory was careful to mention his work for Foundation for a Drug-Free World. Their website reeks of the heavy-handed earnestness characteristic of Scientology's work in this field, together with shock facts about drugs, some of which look about as credible as – well, as certain online book reviews I could mention.⁴

Ellory also praised Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's “humanitarian” work not just in drug rehabilitation but helping develop literacy, a reference to Hubbard's Study Technology. His work with Scientology had also involved “...some fundraising for humanitarian programs etc. – all fairly self-explanatory,” he added.

In 2002 and 2006, a Roger Ellory appears on the Honor Roll in Impact, the magazine of the International Association of Scientologists. Generally that means that someone has contributed significant sums of money to Scientology or recruited a lot of people into the movement, Bisson noted. So, he asked Ellory, which was it?

Ellory said he had helped with some fundraising in the past but he had not earned the Honor Roll status because of money donated, “...and the Church has never been a financial burden to me or my family.”

“He is quite a deep person”

Bisson had done his homework before approaching Ellory – not unreasonable, given Ellory's proactive approach to the truth.

He turned to the Suppressives and Merchants of Chaos over on the message boards for help – and they delivered, hooking him up with some of Ellory's former colleagues.

Haydn James, who ran Scientology's “org” in Birmingham, England, between 1990 and 2005, told Bisson that Ellory had worked there both as an auditor, providing Scientology's version of therapy – and then as a senior recruiter.

To Infinite Complacency, James added: “I worked closely with Roger for 15 years (1990 to 2005). Roger and his wife were at Birmingham org when I arrived. They were both staff there. Pretty much the only staff there.”

John Duignan, a Sea Org veteran who worked out of Birmingham, has known Ellory for more than 20 years. He told Bisson that Ellory's talk of anti-drugs work was a smokescreen. His real job, he said, was as a registrar, hard-selling new recruits expensive packages of auditing.

"I like him": John Duignan

Some of you may recall Duignan's book The Complex, an account of his time inside Scientology. If you've read it, you'll know he is not shy of speaking his mind. We asked Duignan to elaborate.

“His actual title was Hubbard Executive Secretary... and then he moved to Chief Registrar,” he said. “But he was basically in charge of all sales. That was his job – it was to get money into the building.”

Before moving into sales, Ellory was already an auditor, trained up to a fairly high level, he added – and that gave him a certain gravitas among his fellow Scientologists. “He used that technical insight into the auditing process to get people to cough up money.”

Bisson, in his interview, acknowledged that Ellory had been very open about difficult events in his life: he has written of a brief spell in jail for poaching and his drug use when younger, for example. Why then had he kept so quiet about his adherence to Scientology?

Ellroy replied that when on tour to promote his books, he just answered the questions he was asked. “If someone had asked me, then I would have answered those questions, of course,” he added.

John Duignan doesn't buy that.

“I know Roger very well and to be honest with you I like him,” he told us. “But there are two sides to the coin.

“I was always irritated as a Sea Org member that he never promoted that he was a Scientologist. Obviously, now that I'm out on the other side ot the fence I'm still irritated – but for a completely different reason.”

Haydn James got a similar impression.

“I am sure that Scientology changed Roger's life but that was in the early days,” James told Infinite Complacency. “It was clear to me back in 1990 that by that time his personal desire for Scientology services had already waned.

“Besides what he told me, the concrete evidence was the fact that in all the years I knew him he did very little if anything by way of Scientology services and I pretty much respected that wish...

“I think he was still motivated to help people, but by 1990 his big wish and focus was to become a writer. I know, because he would stay up late writing at home and fall asleep, often at his desk, in the org the next day.”

Duignan is not even convinced that it was Ellory who answered the questions that Bisson had put to him.

“The interview pretty much looks like Scientology PR from OSA,” he told us, referring to the Office of Special Affairs, the movement's public relations/intelligence/dirty tricks wing.

“It wasn't Roger talking and I think that's unfortunate and maybe a weakness in the interview, because if it had been Roger it would have been a better interview, as he is quite a deep person.”

Bisson has confirmed to us that it was not a face-to-face meeting but an exchange of emails and he was good enough to send us the original text. It does look a little odd that Ellory's answers veer between and American and English spelling (program/programme).

The French connection

So why all the fuss about Ellory in France? Two reasons.

First, you'll have noticed that Scientology is not terribly popular over here. The 2009 convictions of several Scientologists and two of its organisations on fraud charges were just the latest in a series of run-ins with the French courts over the years.

On the other hand however, the French do like their thrillers – and Ellory seems to be doing good business here. At least four of his 11 books have been translated into French and one of them, A Quiet Belief in Angels, picked up a couple of French awards.

Soon a major film?

Ellory reports on his website: “The book was also optioned for film, and Roger has recently completed the screenplay for Oscar-winning French director, Olivier Dahan.”

It's early days yet: for the moment, the project does not feature as in production at the International Movie Database. But Dahan is certainly a hot property in the film world, even if he hasn't actually won an Oscar as Ellory seems to think. (That was his leading actress Marion Cotillard in the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose.)

Before we light the torches, hand out the pitchforks and march on the castle, it's worth remembering that there is another side to Ellory.

“He's not a shallow person,” says John Duignan. “He is much more multi-dimensional than the typical Scientologist. He has got two lives: a Scientology life and then he has got a life where he loves literature – he is very, very well read.

“He is not as judgmental as the typical Scientologist, who typically would be a fairly poorly educated person who was pulled in and made into a production-line robot. Roger didn't fall into that, he had this whole life that I admired – and envied to be honest with you...

“I admired him because he was able to bridge that gap – because he had those two worlds. I knew the guy for 20 years and he broadened my literary world. He had this bit of himself that was himself, not the Scientology self.

“That was a conflict to some degree, but he was able to straddle those two worlds quite effectively. He was able to have this personal world that he developed and nurtured and kept going that whole time despite the pressure that Scientology put on him – and I really admire that and still

admire that.”

In other words, he had the mindset of a Scientology Celebrity even before he was a celebrity.

Rock and a hard place

Haydn James reminded us just how strong the pull of Scientology, the Scientology community, can be.

Haydn James: Ellory
is "between a rock
and a hard place"

“One of the most potent things about the cult of Scientology... is the fact that there is very much a cult community, a culture – no different to any other cult in that respect. By the '90s it was the only community Roger and his wife knew.

“When his first book started to sell, many of his readers were Scientologists. So he was between a rock and a hard place. If he decided to forsake Scientology, all his initial fans would be obliged to disconnect from him – they might even go so far as to write nasty reviews or hurt his fledgling career.

“At the same time he was embarrassed by Scientology, hence his initial book covers spoke in very vague terms about what he had done in life. I remember him blushing when he showed me his first book cover.

“I think the hard place got harder and the rock became heavier as the years went on. He is still in the place he was back in the '90s, but it is harder and heavier for him.

“Roger was always a 'keep the peace' type person: try to smooth things out and don't make too many waves. Hence he stayed on staff all those years while working like crazy on his own time to get his career as an author going.

“I believe he is pretending to be a dyed-in-the-wool Scientologist to keep the peace with his family and his fan base,” James added.

“He knows what Scientology would do to him if he spoke out or even tried to distance himself. All Scientologists tend to know the consequences of those type of actions.

“But, since his career is now much bigger than it used to be, if the movement against Scientology starts to put him in the spotlight and his connection with Scientology starts to adversely affect his career he may be pushed to take action.

“Being an author is his big love. I don't think he would say anything too heavy against Scientology – he was never that brave – but I think he would distance himself from it if push came to shove.”

We have left a message at Ellory's website, offering him a right of reply. That offer remains open.

---

1   This is an extended version of the piece I wrote for Tony Ortega's The Underground Bunker, published yesterday (April 10, 2013).

2   Thanks to “Captain Howdy” over at the Underground Bunker, for digging up this link. You can see how they eventually resolved the issue at Ellory's Wikipedia page.

3   See “Narconon: an introduction” elsewhere at this site, for details of Scientology's link with this operation.

4   You won't find much about either Hubbard or Scientology at that site: on the other hand, Scientology promotes the foundation enthusiastically at its website.