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to receive Scientology counseling, a heretical practice known in Scientology as
squirreling. (The church denies that Barnett became involved with dissident
Scientologists, but if she had, that would have placed David and Shelly Miscavige in a
compromised position with the church. They would have been Potential Trouble Sources
if they failed to disconnect from her.) On September 8, 1985, Barnett’s body was found.
She had been shot three times in the chest and once through the temple with a rie. Both
of her wrists were slashed. She left two suicide notes. The Los Angeles County Medical
Examiner ruled her death a suicide.
In 2007, Kyle Brennan, twenty years old, who was not a Scientologist, went to stay
with his father, a member of the church, in Clearwater. Brennan was taking Lexapro, an
antidepressant heavily promoted by its manufacturer, Forest Laboratories. He was also
under the care of a psychiatrist. According to court records, Brennan’s father, Thomas,
was ordered to “handle” his son. Thomas Brennan’s auditor was Denise Miscavige
Gentile, David Miscavige’s twin sister. She spoke on the phone to Kyle’s mother, who
was not a Scientologist, and urged her to enroll her son in Narconon, the church’s drugtreatment
program. His mother refused, pointing out that the program costs
approximately $25,000; moreover, Kyle was not a drug addict. She sued, charging that
church ocials had ordered Thomas Brennan to lock his son’s Lexapro in the trunk of
his car. Days after that, Kyle shot himself to death with a .357 Magnum that his father
kept in his bedside table. (The suit was dismissed for lack of evidence.)
The long history of humanity’s inadequate attempts to deal with depression, and the
manifold ways in which insanity expresses itself, have never yielded a clear path.
Tragedies such as the suicide of Kyle Brennan demonstrate the danger of dogmatic
interpretations of psychiatry, such as those oered by Tom Cruise and other Scientology
celebrities on the subject. The American Psychiatric Association felt so threatened by
Cruise’s statements on the Today show that the president of the organization issued a
statement arming that mental illnesses are real medical conditions. “It is irresponsible
for Mr. Cruise to use his movie publicity tour to promote his own ideological views and
deter people with mental illness from getting the care they need,” said Steven S.
Sharfstein, the president of the APA. But at the 2005 annual meeting of the
International Association of Scientologists, Mike Rinder, who had been let out of the
Hole for the occasion, credited Cruise with persuading the Food and Drug
Administration to post suicide warnings on the labels of two psychiatric drugs within
days of his interview with Lauer.
“If someone wants to get o drugs, I can help them,” Cruise told the German
magazine Der Spiegel, in April 2005. “I myself have helped hundreds of people get o
drugs.”
HAGGIS HAD SENT a rough cut of his movie Crash to the Toronto Film Festival, an important
venue for independent lms that are looking for distribution. In September 2004, the
movie met its rst audience at the Elgin Theatre, an elegant old vaudeville house
downtown, not far from the spot where Paul sold tickets at the soft-porn theater his