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elsewhere on the base, he would stand to one side and glare at his colleagues while he
says Miscavige berated and abused them. Although he was physically intimidating,
Rathbun was suering from a number of physical ailments, including a bad back,
gallstones, calcium deposits in his neck, and painful varicose veins, which he believed
came from having to stand at attention for hours on end. He, too, was prone to bursts of
sudden violence. “Once on a phone call I saw him get so mad that he put his st right
through a computer screen,” his former wife recalled. Miscavige would send him down
to observe what was going on in the Hole and come back with reports. In January 2004,
when Rinder was accused of withholding a confession from the group, Rathbun took him
outside and beat him up. Rathbun says Miscavige wasn’t satised. He called Rathbun
into his massive oce in the Religious Technology Center, a cold and imposing room
with steel walls and eighteen-foot ceilings, and accused him of letting Rinder “get away
with murder.” Then, according to Rathbun, out of nowhere, Miscavige grabbed him by
the throat and slammed his head against the steel wall. 5 Rathbun blacked out for a
moment. He wasn’t hurt, but the terms had changed.
A few days later, Rathbun found himself in the Hole, along with the entire
International Management team and other executives. Miscavige said they were going
to stay there until they got the Org Board done.
Scientologists are trained to believe that whatever happens to them is somehow their
fault, so much of the discussion in the Hole centered on what they had done to deserve
this fate. The possibility that the leader of the church might be irrational or even insane
was so taboo that no one could even think it, much less voice it aloud. Most of the
people in the Hole had a strong allegiance to the group—Scientology and the Sea Org—
and they didn’t want to let their comrades down. Many had been in the Sea Org their
entire adult lives and portions of their childhood. Mike Rinder joined the Sea Org when
he was eighteen. Amy Scobee was sixteen. Tom De Vocht was thirteen. They had already
surrendered the possibility of ordinary family life. Sex outside of marriage was taboo, so
many members married in their teens; but since 1986, children have been forbidden to
Sea Org members. Former church executives say that abortions were common and
forcefully encouraged. Claire Headley married Marc when she was seventeen; by the
time she was twenty-one she had been pushed to have two abortions. She estimates that
sixty to eighty percent of the women on Gold Base have had abortions. “It’s a constant
practice,” she said. 6
Worried about pillow talk, Miscavige instituted a policy of imposed divorces in 2004;
people in the Religious Technology Center, the Commodore’s Messenger Organization,
and Golden Era Productions could not be married to members in other divisions. For
many of those people in the Hole, everyone they knew or cared about was in the church.
The cost of leaving—emotionally and spiritually, as well as nancially—was forbidding.
And they knew if they tried to run away, they’d likely be found and punished.
Those who attempted to leave the Sea Org through the formal process of “routing out”
would be presented with a freeloader tab for all the coursework and counseling they had
received over the years. Claire and Marc Headley, for instance, were billed more than
$150,000 when they left and told they would have to pay if they ever wanted to see