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

done no good. “I was paying money for them to fuck me up,” he said, estimating that he
had spent as much as $600,000 in the process, and nearly $1 million in his thirteen-year
Scientology career. When he nally decided to leave the church, he told Tommy Davis
that the church was in a condition of Liability to him. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist
does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the
organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution.
But now the situation was reversed, Beghe maintained. He proposed that the church buy
some property and lease it to him at a negligible rate. “You guys don’t have any policies
to make up the damage, so I’m doing this for your own good—and for mine,” he
explained to Davis and others. “Because I don’t have a policy of taking it in the ass.” 5
While talking to Haggis, Beghe was reluctant to use the word
“brainwashing”—“whatever the fuck that is”—but he did say that somehow his mind had
been taken over. “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that
are L. Ron Hubbard’s,” he explained. “You think you’re becoming more you, but within
that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist.”
Haggis was disturbed by Beghe’s account of what had happened after he left the
church. He claimed that none of his Scientology friends would talk to him, his son had
been kicked out of school, he was being followed by private investigators and
threatened with lawsuits. Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true
believer as some members, he didn’t nurse the same sense of betrayal. “I didn’t feel that
some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would nd L. Ron
Hubbard and his thought,” he said. But he did feel that he had been cautioned.
“TOMMY, ” HAGGIS’S LETTER of August 19, 2009, abruptly begins. “As you know, for ten
months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the
actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of
Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian
citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state
—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public
association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.”
The tone of the letter is both aggrieved and outraged, mixing Haggis’s personal
experiences with the results of his one-man investigation into the church. He mentions
how Katy Haggis’s friends had turned against her when she came out to them as a
lesbian. Katy had told him that another friend of hers had applied to be the assistant for
Jenna and Bodhi Elfman, the Scientology acting couple. Lauren Haigney, Tom Cruise’s
niece in the Sea Org, had been assigned to vet the applicants. Katy says that Lauren
wrote up a report saying that Katy’s friend was known to hang out with lesbians. The
friend did not get the job, Katy said. 6
Haggis also recounted the scene at John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s house, when
another Scientologist made the slur about the gay waiter. “I admire John and Kelly for
many reasons; one of them is the way they handled that,” Haggis stated. “You and I
both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I