Why Scientology Postponed The Super Power Event: Our Archeological Dig For Answers

Since the Tampa Bay Times broke the news Wednesday afternoon that Scientology had postponed indefinitely the October 6 grand opening of its “Super Power Building,” we’ve been digging for answers to why that decision was made, and what it might mean.

Formally known as the “Flag Building,” the massive edifice in Clearwater, Florida has been in progress for 15 years, and for at least a decade Scientologists who have been asked to fund its construction have been told it was on the verge of opening for business. The Tampa Bay Times estimates that about $145 million has been raised for its completion, but some former top Scientology executives say the true figure is closer to $200 million to $230 million.

It’s a 300,000 square foot, seven-story structure with hundreds of auditing rooms, dozens of space age installations, and a giant indoor running track. And finally, after months of frenetic activity to finish up preparations, it was supposed to open on October 6 in a grand opening that the city was told would draw 10,000 Scientologists. But then the event was suddenly cancelled. Why?

We’ve talked to former high-level church executives, we’ve received tips from our inside sources, and we’ve assembled some documents that haven’t been published before. And after digging through this material, we’ve come up with some ideas about what’s going on in the mind of Scientology leader David Miscavige. This is our archeological dig of sorts, and here are the bones that we’ve dug up.

First, let’s dispense with the “shore stories.”

(Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was a Navy man, and one of the notions he bestowed on his organization was that to hide what you were really up to, you put out a “shore story” to throw off prying eyes in port.)

Scientologists are being told a couple of different things about the delay. For months, church members have been asked to come to Clearwater to be trained so they’ll be prepared to receive the new “Golden Age of Technology Phase II” alterations to Scientology’s counseling processes that Miscavige has been preparing to unveil. But now, we hear that GAT II can’t be unleashed upon the church’s far-flung “orgs” until the Executive Directors of those orgs have also been briefed and prepared. So an “ED’s Conference” has been called, and executive directors have been told to report to “Flag” — Scientology’s name for its mecca in Clearwater.

Here’s a new flier from the Western U.S. which we just received, and which confirms that the call for an ED’s Conference has gone out…

 
In this shore story, the ED’s Conference is of the utmost importance, and so it was necessary to postpone the Super Power grand opening.

Another shore story being circulated is that videos for the event being made by Scientology’s audiovisual studios in California, Golden Era Productions, weren’t ready yet, and so the event had to be pushed back.

Of the two, that story is the least believable, as Marc Headley pointed out to us.

For years, Headley worked at Scientology’s secretive International Base near Hemet, California, and he worked to put together the music and videos for Scientology’s big events. He says it was always a mad rush to get them done, and it was always complicated by David Miscavige’s habit of ordering changes up to the last minute.

“There’s no way an entire event would be cancelled because of videos. That never happened when I was there,” he says. “There have been times when we finished the final mix or edit on videos and drove them to the Shrine Auditorium the day of the event. There were even times when videos weren’t ready and Miscavige would use stills or video clips during his speech,” he says.

As for the ED’s Conference, it’s also a weak candidate for why something as important as the Super Power event would be pushed back. For months, as postings at former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder’s blog show, Scientologists were being harangued about getting training and paying large amounts before conditions would be just right for Super Power and GAT II. But it’s pretty clear that all of the prerequisites and conditions Miscavige wanted in place would never be quite right. He could have chosen any of a dozen different training or statistical reasons to say things weren’t ready.

But we don’t buy it.

We think there are other reasons why David Miscavige chose to cancel the Super Power event. And to make our case, we have two lines of evidence. In one, we’re going back into Scientology’s history for something that happened 14 years ago. And for the other, we’re looking at much more recent events — in fact, matters that came together just days before the cancellation.

For Scientologists, New Year’s Eve is one of a handful of the biggest dates on the calendar. And no New Year’s Eve in our lifetimes was bigger than December 31, 1999. For the entire year of 1999, we’re told, high-level Scientology executives worked long hours to make sure every detail of the big celebration at the Los Angeles Sports Arena would be bigger, louder, gaudier, and better than anything that had come before it.

But as the year progressed, something threatened to spoil the party.

The death of church member Lisa McPherson in Clearwater on December 5, 1995 had not become public for another year, but then it had exploded in the news. The woman had experienced a mental breakdown, but when doctors at a hospital tried to get her a psychiatric examination, her fellow Scientologists insisted on taking her into their own care. (A hatred for psychiatry is a hallmark of Scientology.) McPherson was taken to the church-owned Fort Harrison Hotel where, 17 days later, she died of extreme dehydration. Experts who examined records of her autopsy judged that she’d had no liquids at all during her last five days. The implication was pretty clear: rather than allow a Scientologist access to psychiatric care, a very disturbed woman was kept stashed out of sight, raving and incoherent, and was allowed to die of dehydration.

On February 19, 1997, McPherson’s family sued Scientology for wrongful death. On November 13, 1998, the state of Florida filed two felony charges against the church. And through 1999, the publicity about McPherson was steady and disastrous.

Top former Scientology executives tell us that as 1999 progressed, Miscavige became more and more distracted about the McPherson litigation at the same time that the plans for the big Millennium party were mounting.

Then, with only two weeks to go before the big event, disaster struck.

On December 15, a Hillsborough County judge allowed David Miscavige to be added as a defendant in the wrongful death lawsuit.

“The addition of Miscavige as a defendant adds more intensity to a 3-year-old case, which already was hotly contested,” wrote Tom Tobin for the St. Petersburg Times.

(Then, as now, the church’s response was that Miscavige had only a limited role in Scientology and shouldn’t be included as a defendant in litigation against the organization: “Miscavige’s authority in Scientology is limited to ecclesiastical matters, according to church officials,” Tobin wrote.)

Numerous former Scientology executives tell us that Miscavige was so upset about being added to the lawsuit, he threatened to cancel the Millennium event — even though it was just days away and had been undergoing preparations for an entire year.

“The pressure was beyond enormous,” former Scientology official Steve Hall tells us. His job was to script big events like the Millennium party. “Everyone at Int Base was working on this event full time, and I mean everyone. But Miscavige didn’t review the videos and slide shows — as I recall — because he was busy with the legal case. But he did make time to issue new orders that changed all the videos and speeches constantly.”

Steve Hall

 
Former church executives tell us that in those final days, Miscavige said he was going to cancel the event multiple times. And it was clear that the reason wasn’t the chaos of the event planning itself, but the legal case that threatened to haul Miscavige into court.

“He desperately wanted to cancel the Millenium event,” one former executive tells us.

Instead, the party went off as planned. But Marc Headley tells us those last-minute changes helped doom the show.

“He was almost killed that night,” Headley says. “He was almost speared to death by the honor-guard girls who were leaving the stage. He was told to stand in a specific spot. He thought better of that and stood in a different spot. At the end of their act, they threw their flags, with sharp tips, and right at where he was standing. And missed him by centimeters.”

The stage manager who told Miscavige where to stand was sent to the RPF the next day, Headley says. (The RPF is the Sea Org’s prison detail and can take years to complete.)

“It was a total disaster,” Steve Hall says. “The idiot was changing his speech the day before the event. Now how does anyone script three screens of audiovisual to a speech that is changing constantly? Every picture and sound bite was indexed, and that worked for a while. But then you add changes and revisions, and changes and revisions on the changes and revisions… it was a total hash. Everyone at Int Base was assigned Confusion and I think some of them are not out yet. Miscavige torpedoed his own magnum opus, the Millennium event, because he was distracted by legal.”

More than one former executive told us that the entire Int Base was thrown into lockdown, and things were never the same after that. (In the first few minutes of this video from the Tampa Bay Times blockbuster 2009 investigation, “The Truth Rundown,” you’ll see Marty Rathbun refer to this period, when Miscavige reacted severely to being named a defendant in the McPherson litigation.)

After the Millennium event, Miscavige became increasingly irrational toward his own lieutenants until, early in 2004, he threw dozens of them into a strange office-prison, and “The Hole” was born.

That year, 2004, the McPherson civil lawsuit was settled. (The criminal charges had been dropped in 2000.) Scientology had weathered the storm, and now it could look to the future — and nothing said the future like Super Power.

Marc Headley has an entire chapter about the disastrous Millennium event in his book, Blown for Good.

 
In the 1970s, L. Ron Hubbard had developed a number of “rundowns” (counseling processes) that, in total, were known as Super Power, and they were intended to revive tired Sea Org workers by sharpening their senses (“perceptics,” in Hubbard’s lingo). But after Hubbard’s death in 1986, David Miscavige decided to develop Super Power as a special treat for wealthy Scientologists who had already topped out at the upper end of Scientology’s spiritual levels. Church members who had reached OT VIII — the highest level — turned out not to have promised superhuman abilities. But now, the prospect of “Super Power” was held out as an even higher state of being. Miscavige conceived of a massive facility where the special “perceptics” rundowns could all be delivered, and ground was broken for the Super Power building in November, 1998. Ever since, Scientologists have been under pressure to donate tens of thousands of dollars to the completion of the project. Always, it seemed just out of reach. “This year,” church members were told, year after year.

Then, in January, California residents Luis and Rocio Garcia filed a federal fraud lawsuit against the church, claiming in part that they had been defrauded by the Super Power project. Miscavige never meant to open it, they charged, because it was intended only to bring in money — and much more money than it actually cost to build. As we’ve written in the past, the church seems to be taking the Garcia case very seriously. Another allegation the Garcias made was that Scientology’s refund policy was a sham. But after the lawsuit was filed, we obtained e-mails showing that the church was quickly trying to establish that it did give refunds.

The lawsuit also gave the church an incentive to get Super Power finished.

In May, we have learned, two men and a woman asked to tour the Tampa Convention Center to rent it for a future event. When they were asked who they represented, they refused to say, and so they were turned away. Eventually, they told a vice president of the convention center that they worked for Golden Era Productions — Scientology’s audiovisual arm.

The trio said they were interested in renting the convention center for a date in the first week of October, but wouldn’t say what the event was about. And they couldn’t give a precise number of attendees. Between 5,000 and 50,000 was the most they would say.

After their tour, there was no more talk about using the Tampa Convention Center.

We told Mike Rinder about this information, and he said he had no doubt it happened.

“They were definitely planning for this well ahead of time,” he tells us. “I do think they went to the convention center. But then they were told what the price was. I think Miscavige then thought he could bring the tent over instead and use it for both events. And that way, he could control who was there. He has such concerns about security.”

Each fall, the International Association of Scientologists — which exists to raise money for a legal defense fund started after a near-disastrous court case for Scientology in Oregon in the 1980s — holds its annual gala. In recent years, the event has been held in a giant tent in East Grinstead, England. It’s the UK’s one major international Scientology event of the year. (New Year’s Eve is held in Los Angeles, and the L. Ron Hubbard birthday event in March is held in Clearwater.) But last year, the newspaper The Sun managed to get a reporter into the IAS event with the help of some ex-Scientologists, who told the reporter what to do and say. The security breach angered the church so much, it managed to intimidate The Sun into pulling down the article.

If a breach at the IAS event was a concern, security for the Super Power event would be even more important.

This summer, it was announced that the IAS gala would be held not in England but in Clearwater. The giant tent was put on a ship which carried it to Florida. Our readers have been watching the tent go up in a parking lot southeast of the Super Power Building itself. The IAS event was scheduled for November 8 and 9. And the Super Power grand opening was announced for October 6. Last week, the church faced a deadline with the city to turn over more information about its October 6 event in order to get permits for street and sidewalk closures. There were other questions we had about the Super Power grand opening. How, for example, would the IAS tent, which holds only a couple thousand people, fit into plans for an event the church said would draw 10,000 people?

But city deadlines for information weren’t the only thing pressing down on the church.

Like in 1999, as a huge event drew near, David Miscavige was increasingly being distracted by something that terrified him.

He’d been named a defendant in a potentially nightmarish lawsuit.

On August 16, Monique Rathbun filed a harassment lawsuit against David Miscavige. Monique was never a member of the Church of Scientology. But after Mark “Marty” Rathbun, formerly Miscavige’s top lieutenant, started a blog in 2009 and began criticizing his former employer, both of the Rathbuns had then become the targets of an intense surveillance and harassment campaign, Monique alleged.

To illustrate how much this lawsuit concerns Miscavige, he sent more than a dozen high-priced attorneys to the Comal County courthouse in New Braunfels, Texas for a temporary injunction hearing.

We were there, as our readers know. But what even we didn’t know, at least at the time, was that the morning of September 12, as the two-day hearing began, the Church of Scientology International (CSI) filed a motion with the court that we can show you now, and which we think has enormous importance.

On August 16, Monique had been granted a temporary restraining order which prohibited David Miscavige and the church from continuing to surveil or harass her. That TRO had been extended until September 12, the first day that Judge Dib Waldrip had an open date to hold the temporary injunction hearing.

In its motion the church asked Judge Waldrip to dissolve the temporary restraining order.

But what’s really striking about the document is the language in it and the picture it tries to portray.

There’s just no question that if David Miscavige himself did not write it, he was intimately involved in its creation. It starts out, for example, almost word for word like the press releases that Miscavige puts out under the name of church spokeswoman Karin Pouw…

CSI has thousands of churches, Missions, and groups in more than 150 nations. Nineteen million online visitors from 231 countries and territories have viewed the Church’s religious material on Scientology.org in the last twelve months. There have been more than 25 newly-established Ideal Churches of Scientology opened in major cities around the world in recent years with the most recent in Portland, Oregon; Cambridge, Canada; Padova, Italy; Tel Aviv, Israel; Buffalo, New York; Phoenix, Arizona; Denver, Colorado; Los Gatos, San Jose, Santa Ana, Sacramento, Inglewood, Pasadena and Los Angeles, California; Greater Cincinnati, Florence, Kentucky; Hamburg, Germany; St. Paul, Minnesota; Tampa, Florida; Moscow, Russia; Melbourne, Australia; Seattle, Washington; Mexico City, Mexico; Brussels, Belgium; Las Vegas, Nevada; Quebec, Canada; Washington, D.C.; Rome, Italy; Nashville, Tennessee; Dallas, Texas and Malmo, Sweden. These new Churches provide religious services and support the Church’s social betterment and humanitarian programs that reach millions each year. Scientology is a thriving, growing religion that, like all established religions, has its detractors.

 
After that self-congratulatory opening, Miscavige gets to the point — this lawsuit is about his former lieutenant and today, his biggest enemy: Marty Rathbun and his thirst for revenge…

This lawsuit has been strategically filed by Mark “Marty” Rathbun vicariously through his wife, Monique Rathbun, as a part of his four year crusade to harass and defame the Church of Scientology in the media and promote his books and blog. Plaintiff’s aggressive use of the media will be self-evident immediately after all filing and hearings in this matter. This litigious use of his wife as a part of his media crusade is an unfortunate abuse of the judicial system. For example, on his website he provides a link entitled “News About Monique,” which links to a fringe blog named The Underground Bunker and an article on this lawsuit quoting extensively from Plaintiff’s Original Petition and Plaintiff’s counsel Ray Jeffrey.

 
The lawsuit is all about Marty’s media campaign and his own enrichment…

Mr. Rathbun does not bring this lawsuit in his own name for fear of being subject to the procedural discovery and legal scrutiny of a lawsuit in his own name. Mr. Rathbun also erroneously wishes to avoid certain legal issues that would defeat any lawsuit brought in his own name, including the legal holdings that, as a public figure, he has no reasonable expectation of privacy. Mr. Rathbun also hopes that his cowardly strategy of using his wife in his crusade against the Church will allow him to obtain the benefit of overly broad injunctive relief that will deter proper investigation and discovery into his malicious conduct. Mr. Rathbun is also of the erroneous notion that he can use his wife’s lawsuit to maliciously defame the Church through pleadings, attorney press conferences, and blog postings and avoid legal responsibility under the hopeful protection of legal immunity. He is wrong.

 
The motion goes on to detail Rathbun’s activities since he left the church in 2004. He resurfaced in 2009 with a “vicious media campaign” against the church, conducting himself “in an obsessive and hateful manner.” He became an “indie” Scientologist who pretended to be “one of L. Ron Hubbard’s staunchest supporters.” Rathbun, Rinder, and Monique’s attorney Ray Jeffrey, meanwhile, have taken part in 15 other legal actions against the church.

Monique has “aided and abetted” her husband, and as a consequence is, like Marty, “a public figure with no legal expectation of privacy.”

And as a result of all that, “CSI is more than entitled to legally conduct non-intrusive surveillance of Mr. and Mrs. Rathbun in accordance with Texas law.” That surveillance, the motion argues, is protected free speech.

The motion is signed by Ricardo G. Cedillo, a prominent and respected San Antonio attorney and partner in the firm Davis, Cedillo & Mendoza.

But make no mistake. Much of the language in this remarkable motion came right from David Miscavige’s cerebral cortex.

And that’s why we believe it’s so instructive to examine this document now — because just hours after it was submitted, the men representing Miscavige in that Texas courtroom who were clearly supposed to follow this document as a playbook, fumbled about as badly as possible.

We know. We were there.

If you were following along with our live-blogging from the courtroom, you know that some of these phrases and ideas were introduced by the three local attorneys hired for the occasion: Les Strieber (from Cedillo’s firm), George Spencer, and Lamont Jefferson.

But our reporting also captured just how ridiculous they sounded. If the motion is overheated and almost vicious, Strieber, during his cross-examination of Monique Rathbun, was generally polite. When he did take a harsher tone with her — “Are you picking a fight with the Church of Scientology?” — it came off stilted and silly. Whenever Strieber tried to make it sound like Marty Rathbun was really behind the suit, it came off as a fishing expedition. When Spencer tried to go after Ray Jeffrey, it sounded forced and ineffectual. And when Jefferson tried to argue that David Miscavige was just an ecclesiastical leader and wouldn’t have anything to do with surveillance or harassment, he and Strieber ended up confusing things so much, Judge Waldrip asked if the alphabet soup of Scientology’s various entities weren’t interchangeable.

If David Miscavige’s intention was that his legal team deliver the kind of invective in his motion, and follow its lead in order to deliver the Rathbuns’ lawsuit a decisive blow, it was an even more disastrous result than we realized at the time.

Judge Waldrip not only knocked down Spencer’s arguments about disqualifying Ray Jeffrey and raised questions about Lamont Jefferson’s theories about keeping Miscavige out, he didn’t even seem to entertain the motion itself. At the end of the two day hearing, Waldrip said that the temporary restraining order that CSI wanted dissolved would instead remain in force at least through October 18, when testimony can resume.

Until then, David Miscavige is still under court order to keep his goons away from Monique Rathbun.

We’re pretty confident that Miscavige knew exactly how badly things were going in the courtroom.

Several of us present noticed that Scientology attorney Gary Soter was tapping away at a laptop throughout the proceedings — and in fact, he had come over to bark at Tampa Bay Times reporter Joe Childs and some photographers in the courtroom, accusing them of trying to photograph what was on his screen.

We got the distinct impression that on the other end of that laptop was someone in Los Angeles or Clearwater keeping a close minute-by-minute watch on the proceedings.

We also remarked, in our live-blogging, that we saw Scientology attorney Kendrick Moxon suddenly get up and bolt out of the courtroom, his phone in hand. (In fact it happened several times.)

We have a notion who was on the other end of that phone call.

And now, after examining the motion that was filed the morning of September 12, and the performance of the local attorneys, and the reactions of the Scientology attorneys from California, we are led to one conclusion: Scientology leader David Miscavige was fully aware of how much his scorched-earth tactics were going nowhere in that courtroom, and that his chances of actually getting hauled into this thing seemed to be increasing.

Five days later, he called off the October 6 Super Power grand opening.

We dare to believe that there’s a connection.

“Miscavige is always listening in on anything super critical,” says Steve Hall, who was one of the first to tell us that there was likely to be a direct connection between the events in the Comal County courtroom and the cancellation in Clearwater. “So there’s no way he has time to take off for an event. He’s going to cancel that, blame everyone else for not being prepared and ‘forcing him to cancel,’ and meanwhile he’s got his head in that courtroom full time and is driving someone insane with texts.”

We heard the same from other former executives who urged us to believe that yes, Miscavige really is that sensitive about what’s being said about him in a courtroom a thousand miles away, or in court documents, or even in a blog on the fringes of the Internet.

 
III. The Fringes of the Internet

“I think the Oiliness Table probably cost $400,000 on its own,” says Marc Headley, and we ask him to repeat it to make sure we heard him right.

In January 2012, at the Village Voice, we revealed for the first time a nearly full set off renderings for the Super Power building, including the high-tech “perceptics” installations on the fifth floor where the Super Power rundowns would be delivered. Among the strange contraptions (the Smell Wall, the Infinite Pit, the Pain Station, and many more) was the Oiliness Table. (“Oiliness” is one of 57 senses that Hubbard says make up the perceptics.)

It was an instant hit with our readers, and remains a favorite source of humor here at the Bunker.

One of several renderings of the Oiliness Table. How does it measure your oiliness? We only wish we knew.

 
“They were spending millions on perceptics when I was there,” Headley says. Although the Super Power Building is in Clearwater, the rundowns and installations were developed and tested at Int Base in California, where Headley worked.

“They had a guy from NASA build a balance platform. It shifts its direction quickly, and you have to be able to stand on it for 10 seconds to say, OK, your balance is all right. Ray Mithoff fell off it in one second,” he says. “What I’m trying to tell you is they’re spending millions on these things, and for you to come along and joke about the oiliness table, that drives Miscavige nuts, I’m telling you.”

It was no accident that the Underground Bunker ended up in the church’s motion that was intended to be a playbook for Miscavige’s local attorneys, he says.

“I think you posting that blueprint last week might even have had something to do with the cancellation,” Headley adds.

Really?

“Absolutely,” he says.

On September 15, two days after the hearings had ended and three days before the Super Power event was cancelled, we published an image of a schematic we were told was a plan for the backdrop being developed for the IAS tent stage. At these events, Miscavige always has elaborate, baroque, and expensive backdrops constructed for him to stand in front of as he delivers a three-hour speech. But this time, a blueprint of the backdrop had been leaked to us.

“What they’re saying is ‘How the hell does Tony Ortega in New York have our plans for the event inside the tent in Clearwater?’ I’m telling you, it’s a huge deal that you had that internal document. They think, if you have that, what else do you have? Right now they’re trying to figure out how you got that,” Headley says.

What, you mean this?

 
Well, maybe it was a combination of things that led to the big cancellation. The apparently crappy performance of Miscavige’s attorneys in Texas (but who knows what Judge Waldrip really thought or how he’ll rule), the blueprint, Leah Remini’s dancing, a bad shrimp. Ultimately, we really don’t know for sure why Miscavige called off the big event.

But Headley points out that the bigger news is that the cancellation puts Miscavige in an increasingly bad position. We’ll let him explain.

There were no June 6 events this year. That’s significant because it’s at “Maiden Voyage” — to celebrate Scientology’s cruise ship the Freewinds — where you have all of the richest and highest-level Scientologists all in one place for a full week of events. There is an event each night. The Church of Spiritual Technology, Author Services Inc., the tech, legal, ABLE and WISE, and the IAS each get their own night and get a chance to drum up donations for their sector. This is also how Captain Dave monitors the whales closely, and gets all the inside gossip on them as well. One year they got video of one of the OT VIII’s at a nude beach — true story.

Somehow the Auditor’s Day event in September was also cancelled. And it’s on Auditor’s Day that you’d want to publicize a new release like GAT II — it’s the auditors that will be implementing it. It’s a no-brainer. And since Super Power was written up in the late 1970s, you’d think they would have had this pretty well done by now.

But here is where things get tricky. The IAS gala in October (now moved to November) is usually the one event per year where Captain Dave Miscavige gets to kiss some European and UK ass and milk the overseas whales for some cash. They hate flying over to the US and especially for an event where they know they will be fleeced. Apparently, if they are going to get fleeced, they prefer it to take place in their own backyard.

And the IAS event usually does not need a product release. This is usually where the Gold Shoot crew go out and video a few people who either pass out a shit-ton of books or hang out in prisons getting people to do TRs. So you end up with three videos and then a great speech on how the SPs are getting their asses kicked by the Psych Busters, and maybe an update on how there are no active legal cases anywhere in the world — that, after all, is what the IAS was created to do, raise money for a gigantic legal defense fund to power litigation wherever it was needed and keep the courts out of Scientology’s business.

This is the other reason not to release a product at IAS (like GAT II or Super Power, for example). If people are going to buy something, they are going to buy one thing. If you hit them up for multiple things, they take the easy road and bail on the $50,000 donation to raise their IAS status.

Somehow at the IAS event, Dave will have to give the impression that he’s kicking ass even though there are more legal cases than ever — and what is he going to say about Super Power, which is right across the street?

Captain Dave will undoubtedly come up with a story about a giant hoop of fire that he had to jump through, and some unbelievable amount of paper that was used to write success stories, and if you lined these up they would go to Saturn and back.

The bottom line is that right now Captain Dave is pulling his frigging hair out trying to weave all this shit together and somehow pull this off while the people who have been up all night for days and weeks working for him are sabotaging his every move.

This is not over. Now that Captain Dave has a microscope shoved up his backside, he will become even more erratic and psychotic in the days to come.

Maiden Voyage. Auditor’s Day. The Super Power grand opening. That’s three big events in a row, all cancelled.

In 15 years that I was at the international Scientology headquarters, never once did an event get cancelled altogether.

Not once.

 
We asked Headley, might Miscavige hold the IAS event in its usual form in November, and then combine Super Power and GAT II on the New Year’s Eve event? (The tent is permitted through January.)

“That makes more sense,” Headley responded. “He can say on New Year’s Eve that all of this year’s work has culminated in the big new releases.”

But if it doesn’t happen then? Headley points out that Hubbard’s birthday — March 13 — comes up awfully fast after New Year’s, and it would be completely inappropriate to debut a new release like Super Power or GAT II at an event that is supposed to venerate Hubbard and his creations, not Miscavige’s repackaging.

“So then you’re back to Maiden Voyage and then Auditor’s Day, when you should really debut a new release. I could actually see this being delayed until then, September next year,” he said.

Well, who knows. Obviously, we’ll be very interested to see if the IAS date of November 8 holds up.

And of course, in the meantime, the legal nightmare for Scientology only seems to get worse.

But hey, at least Miscavige has that oiliness table up on the fifth floor of the Super Power Building.

We sure wish he’d open the thing and give us a tour. We want to see that sucker.

 
——————–

Jenna Elfman Tells You About Toxins!

If only we could head over to the Hollywood Celebrity Centre for what ought to be a very entertaining evening…

From: Jenni Fairchild
To:
Subject: Special Invitation

You have been invited to a private presentation given by Golden Globe Winner JENNA ELFMAN & Writer/Producer Andrea Abbate (The Office, Accidentally on Purpose) & Producer/Writer/Environmental health activist R. Michael Wisner.

Mr. Wisner will present original scientific research data on dangerous toxins in our environment and Jenna and Andrea will share with you exactly how your creative abilities are being blocked by the toxins within your body.

Tuesday, 24 Sept 2013 at 7:30pm
Celebrity Centre
5930 Franklin Ave
LA, CA 90028
RSVP is mandatory (323) 960 – 3113

 
——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on September 23, 2013 at 07:00

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