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enjoy her famous coconut cake and schmooze with local ocials including the mayor of
Tampa and inuential lawyers and judges. He showed clips of his movies and testied
about how Scientology had changed his life. Fox News host Greta van Susteren provided
sunset cruises on her yacht. Repper held a brunch for Michelle Staord; the guests were
mainly women who were fans of The Young and the Restless, including the secretaries of
local judges. Meantime, the church threw black-tie galas in the ballroom of the Fort
Harrison Hotel, where Edgar Winter, Chick Corea, or Isaac Hayes would perform. The
Pinellas County sheri attended these events, along with the mayors of Clearwater and
Tampa, as well as a number of lawyers and judges who had been targeted by the church
as community leaders. Rathbun says that when Miscavige learned that Jerey Goodis
and his wife were big fans of John Travolta, they were invited to a gala at the Fort
Harrison Hotel, and Travolta was asked to thank them for their help. Rathbun says the
star was told, “This guy is really going to bat for us.”
The church poured money into local charities. According to Rathbun and Rinder, the
idea was to change the climate of public opinion and thereby inuence the attitude of
the courts toward the church. Rathbun says there was a parallel campaign to discredit
Lisa McPherson’s family as golddiggers who were exploiting their daughter’s death.
In a recent deposition, Rathbun estimated that the entire campaign to shut down the
prosecution of the church cost over $20 to $30 million. (The civil suit brought by the
family settled for an undisclosed sum in 2004.)
SCIENTOLOGY WAS UNDER ATTACK elsewhere in the world as well. Germany, acutely sensitive
to the danger of extremist movements, viewed Scientology with particular alarm. In
Hamburg, in 1992, the state parliament created a commission to investigate “destructive
groups,” a category that included the Church of Satan, Transcendental Meditation, and
the Unication Church, but was mainly aimed at Scientology. Scientologists were barred
from holding government jobs and forbidden to join Germany’s main political party, the
Christian Democratic Union, because they weren’t considered Christians. The youth
wing of the party organized boycotts of Cruise’s rst Mission: Impossible and Travolta’s
movie Phenomenon. The city of Stuttgart canceled a concert by Chick Corea when it was
discovered that he was a Scientologist. Seventy percent of Germans favored the idea of
banning the organization altogether.
The 1990s saw the rise of apocalyptic movements in many dierent countries. As the
millennium drew near, the theme of science ction and UFOs became especially
pronounced and deadly. In October 1994, police in Switzerland, investigating a re in a
farmhouse, discovered a hidden room with eighteen corpses wearing ceremonial
garments, arranged like spokes in a wheel. Other bodies were found elsewhere on the
farm. Their heads were covered with plastic bags; some had been shot or beaten. The
next day, three chalets burned in another Swiss village. Investigators found more than
two dozen bodies in the ruins. They had been poisoned. Some of the dead had been lured
to the scene and murdered, but most were followers of Joseph Di Mambro, a French
jeweler, who had created a new religion, the Order of the Solar Temple. Di Mambro’s