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

where they were on the Bridge. Wilhere, who was actually in the Hole at the time, was
taken out of connement, given a BlackBerry and ve thousand dollars to buy civilian
clothes at a Saks Fifth Avenue outlet, then sent to New York and Los Angeles to
videotape the interviews. Rinder noticed that when Cruise arrived at the Freedom Medal
of Valor ceremony a month later, he was accompanied by a raven-haired young actress
and model, Yolanda Pecoraro. She was born into Scientology and had completed a
number of courses at the Celebrity Centre and on the Freewinds, but she was only
nineteen years old. Cruise was forty-two at the time.
The Scientology search team came up with another aspiring actress, Nazanin Boniadi,
twenty-ve years old, who had been born in Iran and raised in London. Naz was well
educated and beautiful in the way that Cruise was inclined to respond to—dark and
slender, with large eyes and a ashing smile. She had studied pre-med at the University
of California at Irvine before deciding to try her luck as an actress. More important for
the purposes of the match, however, was the fact that Boniadi was an OT V. Her mother
was also a Scientologist.
In early November 2004, Naz was informed that she had been selected for a special
program that was critical to the future of the church, but it was so secret she wouldn’t be
allowed to tell anyone, even her mother. Naz was moved immediately into the Celebrity
Centre, where she spent a month going through security checks and special auditing
programs. She hoped the project had something to do with human rights, which was her
special interest, but all she was told was that her participation would end bigotry
against Scientology.
At one point during the intensive auditing and security checks, Wilhere informed her
that she would have to break up with her longtime boyfriend in order for the project to
proceed. She refused. She couldn’t understand why her boyfriend posed any kind of
problem; indeed, she had personally introduced him to Scientology. Wilhere persisted,
asking what it would take for her to break o the romance. Flustered, she responded
that she would break up if she knew he had been cheating on her. According to Naz’s
friends, the very next day, Wilhere brought in her boyfriend’s condential auditing les
and showed her several instances of his indelities, which had been circled in red. Naz
felt betrayed, but also guilty, because Wilhere blamed her for failing to know and report
her boyfriend’s ethical lapses herself; after all, she had audited him on several occasions.
Obviously, she had missed his “withhold.” She confronted her boyfriend and he
confessed. That was the end of their relationship. 7
Another time, Naz was asked what her “ideal scene for 2-D”—in other words, her
dream date—would be. It was eating sushi and going ice-skating. But she wondered why
that was important.
One of her assignments was to study a bulletin of Hubbard’s titled “The
Responsibilities of Leaders.” It is Hubbard’s deconstruction of the lives of the nineteenthcentury
South American military leader Simón Bolívar and his ferociously protective
mistress, a socialite named Manuela Sáenz. Bolívar, Hubbard writes, “was a military
commander without peer in history. Why he would fail and die an exile to be later
deied is thus of great interest. What mistakes did he make?” Sáenz, his consort, “was a