going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

time away, Miscavige called him into his oce and said, “I nally know who my SP is.
The two years you were gone was the only unenturbulated time in my life.” He ordered
him to Clearwater, his rank broken, as a trainee. That didn’t last, either. A number of
tabloid sensations arose surrounding Scientology celebrities—Lisa Marie Presley was
divorcing Michael Jackson, Kirstie Alley was divorcing actor Parker Stevenson—and
Miscavige again turned to Rathbun to cool the press down.
Then, on December 5, 1995, a Scientologist named Lisa McPherson died following a
mental breakdown. She had rear-ended a boat that was being towed in downtown
Clearwater, Florida, near the church’s spiritual headquarters. When paramedics arrived,
she stripped o her clothes and wandered naked down the street. She said she needed
help and was taken to a nearby hospital. Soon afterward, a delegation of ten
Scientologists arrived at the hospital and persuaded McPherson to check out, against
doctors’ advice. McPherson spent the next seventeen days under guard in room 174 of
the Fort Harrison Hotel.
For Scientologists, McPherson’s mental breakdown presented a confounding dilemma.
McPherson had been declared Clear just three months before, after ten years of courses
and auditing and substantial contributions to the church. The process had been like “a
gopher being pulled through a garden hose,” she later said, but it had been worth it. “I
am so full of life I am overwhelmed at the joy of it all!” she wrote. “WOW!”
Clears are supposed to be invulnerable to mental frailty. People on the base knew
that McPherson had been acting strangely before her breakdown. Marty Rathbun, who
was at Flag Base during this time, remembers seeing McPherson screaming in the
hallways of the Fort Harrison Hotel, because she had just been declared Clear. “Aaaaaah!
Yahoo!” she cried. She looked insane. How did she get to be Clear when she was
obviously irrational? And who was responsible for deciding that she had achieved that
state? According to Rathbun and several other former church ocials who were present
at the time, the case supervisor who pronounced Lisa McPherson Clear was David
Miscavige. He had gone to Flag in the summer of 1995 to take over the auditing
delivered at the base. He would also supervise the treatment of McPherson that
followed. 4
When McPherson entered room 174, she was a lovely, shapely young woman. She
underwent an Introspection Rundown, the same procedure that Hubbard had developed
on the Apollo two decades earlier to treat psychotic behavior. It involved placing
McPherson in solitary connement and providing her with water, food, and vitamin
supplements. All communication had to be in writing. Instead of calming down,
McPherson stopped eating. She screamed, she clawed her attendants, she spoke in
gibberish, she fouled herself, she banged her head against the wall. Sta members
strapped her down and tried to feed her with a turkey baster.
On December 5, McPherson slipped into a coma. When church members decided to
take her to the hospital that night, they bypassed the Morton Plant Hospital, just down
the street, where McPherson had originally been seen, and drove her forty-ve minutes
away, passing four other hospitals, to the Columbia New Port Richey Hospital, where
there was a doctor aliated with the church. The woman they nally wheeled into the