Note: We’re posting the same item we published a year ago as an annual tribute to an amazing event. Hip, hip, hooray.
Twenty-seven years ago today, L. Ron Hubbard decided to leave his body after using it for 74 years.
A young David Miscavige, a Sea Org member who behind the scenes had been clearing the way to become Hubbard’s successor as leader of the Scientology movement, announced Hubbard’s death to his followers at the Palladium in Los Angeles. It is still a dramatic moment.
“Approximately two weeks ago, he completed all of his researches he had set out to do,” Miscavige says, and you can hear the audience react with admiration and applause, apparently not realizing what’s coming.
Last night, like many of you, we watched Lawrence Wright’s appearance on Anderson Cooper 360, which not only featured a rapid-fire interview of Wright by the CNN host, but also some looks back at Cooper’s 2010 show on Scientology. That four-part series explored accusations about church leader David Miscavige and violence that were first revealed in the St. Petersburg Times. In other words, the nostalgia value was high.
But if Wright was in rare form on CNN, he was even better in person. Also last night, Wright and his New Yorker editor Daniel Zalewski put on a great show at 92YTribeca in front of about 100 folks who had come in from the bitter cold.
And the words that Wright used to finish that show are still ringing in our ears. Scientology, he said, is heading for a reckoning.
In what appears to be the most serious legal challenge to Scientology in several years, former high-level Scientologists Luis Garcia and his wife Rocio of Irvine, California today filed a federal lawsuit against the Church of Scientology, alleging fraud over the way their contributions to the church — more than $400,000 — were misspent. The suit was filed in Florida’s Middle District with the help of the prestigious law firm Babbitt Johnson Osborne & Le Clainche, which says it plans to file additional lawsuits by other former church members.
UPDATE: See attorney Scott Pilutik’s thoughts on the lawsuit, below.
In 1993, the Internal Revenue Service granted Scientology tax exempt status, but the church was still beholden to an earlier Supreme Court decision that required it, as in a business, to give members refunds when they requested them.
Now that Scientology is in the grips of crisis and more and more longtime members like the Garcias are walking away from the church, an increasing number of them have asked for refunds — and the church isn’t giving them.
We’ve written about this state of affairs numerous times. Now, the Garcias have filed a lawsuit that accuses church leader David Miscavige of turning Scientology into little more than a fraudulent money-making scam.
“The Church, under the leadership of David Miscavige, has strayed from its founding principles and morphed into a secular enterprise whose primary purpose is taking people’s money,” the complaint says.
This report from CNN today gives you an indication of how the Church of Scientology is fighting back at Larry Wright’s book, Going Clear. It’s really quite entertaining. And should be even more so when, we hear, Wright appears on Anderson Cooper 360 tonight. Let’s all tune in! (Go here if you can’t get enough of the hilariously huffy lawyer letters that Scientology has sent CNN.)
Also, we hear that a major new Scientology story is going to break tomorrow, but we can’t say anything about it yet. We’re full of secrets today.
So we’ll take this brief lull to catch up on some of the items that have reached the bunker while we’ve been dealing with so many recent emergencies.
We are happy to report that love springs eternal for Tom Cruise’s daughter Isabella, who has been reunited with her boyfriend Eddie Frencher.
In August, we broke the news that Eddie had joined Scientology’s elite clerical order, the “Sea Organization,” which requires its members to sign billion-year contracts. Apparently, that turned out to be a billion years too many for Frencher, and both lovebirds appear very happy about it.
On Sundays, we bring to you the latest fliers and mailers and e-mails that Scientologists have received as the church encourages them to donate to one campaign after another. It’s dizzying to keep up with all the requests for cash that church members get hit up for, and this week we received a lot of interesting things to choose from. We call our weekly feature Sunday Funnies. So let’s dig in!
UPDATE 8:05 PM — The “Knowledge” Ad just ran during the AFC game, as promised. See our update below.
Our tipsters really came through this week. We were just sent this first flier, which claims that not only will Scientology’s “Knowledge” ad run during tonight’s AFC Championship game, but it also says that the church has bought an ad for Super Bowl XLVII on February 3!
That’s big news, and church members are being hit up for donations to help finance the ad. But is it really happening?
UPDATE: PLEASE SEE THE NOTE WE’VE ADDED TO THE END OF THE POST
In 2011, we told you about Jamie DeWolf and his amazing monologue about his great-grandfather, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and we predicted that he would continue to gain fame for his views. Now, during this worst week ever for the church, Jamie continues to fulfill that prophecy in a big way.
At the local ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, KABC Channel 7, producer Lisa Bartley got another very fine show past that station’s uptight brass, and we’re especially impressed by some of the images she gathered for Jamie’s interview. But that wasn’t all the attention Jamie received this week.
UPDATE: PLEASE SEE THE NOTE THAT WE’VE ADDED TO THE END OF THE POST
Oh, those wacky Taiwanese animators have really given us a treat this time. Their latest offering is this send-up of the launch of Lawrence Wright’s book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief. (And now in English!)
We can’t get enough of the tiny Tom Cruise jumping up and down on the couch.
And that’s not the only thing rounding out this amazing week of Scientology news. After the break, we have some other interesting nuggets to share with you.
Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, Bay Area lawyer, and writer Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.
Last week, L. Ron Hubbard explained that there’s a superman inside each one of us that he calls a “clear,” and his “dianetic therapy” is going to help us retrieve a clear’s super abilities — vivid technicolor recall of our memories, enhanced intelligence, imperviousness to ailments, and good eyesight — by ridding us of our “aberrations.” (In the introduction to the book he tells us this should take about 20 hours of exercises to make us go clear.)
Now, in the third chapter of the book (and the second full chapter), “The Goal of Man,” Hubbard says that he’s unlocked the secret of our existence. What is the purpose of our lives on Earth? His answer is simply one word: “SURVIVE!”
“It is not a new thought that Man is surviving. It is a new thought that Man is motivated only by survival,” he writes.
Vance, we’ve had the impression that Scientologists, even today, consider this some kind of genius insight by Hubbard. But Hubbard was writing nearly a century after a guy named Charles Darwin published his book On The Origin of Species and figured out that competition for survival is what fueled natural selection and biological evolution. Can you help us understand why Hubbard’s idea is considered so revolutionary by church members?
Last night we had a helluva time live-blogging Nancy Many’s docudrama about Scientology spying on the ID network. Many of you joined us, and it was exhilarating to trade observations about the show as it was happening.
Hey, let’s do it again for tonight’s big show on NBC’s Rock Center with Paul Haggis that marks the publication of Lawrence Wright’s book, Going Clear!
