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Marty Rathbun on being ambushed at LAX by raving Scientologists: ‘It was insane’

Jenny DeVocht

Jenny DeVocht

On Sunday evening, Mark “Marty” Rathbun, formerly the second-highest ranking official in the Church of Scientology, posted a bizarre 2-minute video to his blog, a video he had taken earlier in the day while he was waiting at Los Angeles International Airport to catch a flight back to his home in Texas.

Marty wouldn’t say why he was in LA, but he characterized the meeting with three church executives in the terminal as an “ambush.”

He filmed a couple of minutes of the encounter as Marc Yager, Jenny Linson DeVocht, and Dave Bloomberg took turns telling Rathbun that he was “pathetic” and an “embarrassment” while Bloomberg filmed the fracas.

Rathbun says he assumes the Scientologists will say, if they’re asked, that it was a random encounter in a busy airport. “But there was only one carry-on bag for the three of them,” Marty points out. And the way they moved — with Bloomberg filming them while Yager and DeVocht took turns telling Marty off, pointed to some coordination.

“It was pretty clear that they rehearsed this,” Marty says. Here, judge for yourself…

 

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The result is simply surreal. We couldn’t help feeling we were watching some sort of deleted scene from a Terry Gilliam movie.

Rathbun tells us that what we can’t see is the terminal gate behind him, with about a hundred and fifty people waiting for a flight, and all of them gawking at what was unfolding in front of them.

“It’s totally the Squirrel Busters,” Rathbun says, and we have to agree it has the same bizarre quality as the intimidation squad of church members who called themselves Squirrel Busters and patrolled the Rathbun home, day after day, in the spring and summer of 2011.

“The setup was for me to shove or hit Yager, who was giving me this leering grin,” Marty points out. As with the Squirrel Busters in Texas, the point is to get the person being harassed upset enough to take a punch — and then call in cops or file a legal complaint. “The thinking is, we’re going to make you go off or make you cave into yourself. It was insane.”

Unlike the Squirrel Busters, who were made up of little-known church members, Rathbun was confronted Sunday morning by some of the highest-ranking, well known figures in the Church of Scientology.

Marc Yager is a Watchdog Committee member and the “highest ecclesiastical officer” of the Church of Scientology International, Rathbun points out. And Jenny DeVocht — known for an infamous appearance on Anderson Cooper in 2010 — is close to Scientology leader David Miscavige.

“Jenny is closer to Miscavige than anybody,” Rathbun says. “I’m willing to bet she doesn’t even have a post title because she’s literally his right arm.”

But here’s what really stuns us about this encounter — its timing. Right now, the Texas Third Court of Appeals is deliberating on whether to reverse the denial of the Church of Scientology’s anti-SLAPP motion in Monique Rathbun’s lawsuit for harassment — the same kind of harassment that her husband just experienced.

One of the key elements in the lawsuit so far is whether any of the surveillance of the Rathbuns was connected to Scientology’s leader. Miscavige denies having anything to do with the stalking and photographing of Monique and her husband in Texas, and a collection of low-level church members and private eyes has tried to convince the court they were acting on their own.

But here? Three top Scientology officials, one as close to Miscavige as it gets, somehow learn that Marty Rathbun is traveling (a trick the church has practiced for decades) and then show up to berate him in a bizarre scene clearly intended to intimidate him? It’s almost impossible to imagine that Miscavige had nothing to do with today’s incident.

Could the church have provided any better evidence that what they’re telling the courts in Texas is a pack of lies?

“They’re so sure they’re going to get away with this shit in court, they don’t care,” Rathbun tells us.

There’s so much packed into this two minutes of video, we haven’t even touched on the fact that all three of the executives in the video were prisoners in Scientology’s internal prison, “The Hole.”

Repeatedly, the three of them tell Marty how bad he looks — but the years in The Hole have clearly taken their toll on these middle-aged Scientology lifers.

And Jenny is infamous for her 2010 Anderson Cooper appearance for one line in particular: “I slept with Tom DeVocht for almost 20 years. I knew every inch of him,” she said as she and other wives of Scientology whistleblowers appeared on the fourth and final night of Cooper’s special about the alleged abuses of Miscavige. Jenny’s statement was meant to impeach the testimony of her former husband, Tom DeVocht, who said he was one of the church execs who was physically assaulted by Miscavige. Jenny denied that DeVocht had a mark on him by uttering her famous line. The women have been dubbed “the inch wives” ever since.

Anyway, we’re just stunned that this encounter happened. Once again Scientology is incapable of understanding what plays well for the public. But maybe they do believe they can get away with anything and this country’s courts will continue to turn a blind eye.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on October 19, 2014 at 23:30

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Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

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