We want to warn you the story we’re reprinting today is very disturbing and contains graphic descriptions that some may find difficult to deal with. Eight years ago we marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Lisa McPherson by recording, in real time, the final weeks of her life. Today marks the 28th anniversary [...]]]>

 
We want to warn you the story we’re reprinting today is very disturbing and contains graphic descriptions that some may find difficult to deal with. Eight years ago we marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Lisa McPherson by recording, in real time, the final weeks of her life. Today marks the 28th anniversary of her final day on earth, and we are reproducing the culminating piece of our series which we published eight years ago.

It’s a harrowing account of Lisa’s final hours, and not for the squeamish. If you are not familiar with her story, you might go back to the beginning of our series (links are provided below) about this lovely woman whose mental breakdown was treated by Scientology with a grim enforced seclusion at their holiest place, the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. By this point, she was on her 17th day of isolation, with her caretakers not saying a word to her as dictated by the policies of L. Ron Hubbard.

What Laura Arrunada, Lisa McPherson’s final caretaker, saw in Room 174 of the Fort Harrison Hotel in the last three days of Lisa’s life was so upsetting, Marty Rathbun made her reports disappear.

Laura had trained to be a doctor in Mexico, and had completed her coursework and a two-year residency, but had stopped short of taking the board exam to become a physician. Ten years later, she was working in the Sea Org at Scientology’s Flag Land Base in its medical liaison office. She had first been asked to work a shift with Lisa McPherson on the day after Thanksgiving.

A week later, she was working with Rita Boykin and Heather Hoff while being overseen by Janis Johnson. Laura’s shifts started in the late afternoon and went until the early morning. And on Lisa’s final two nights, Laura witnessed a disturbing sight.

Sunday night, December 3, 1995, Laura watched as Lisa, who at this point could no longer stand or get around the hotel room on her own, was lying flat on the floor, face down. And her hips began to move.

Laura began to realize what was happening. Lisa was moving as if she was having sex with someone. She was kissing the floor and grinding her pelvis on it. Then, Lisa turned from the floor and began to masturbate.

Laura told police that Lisa repeated the act the next night, Lisa’s last alive. And while pushing and rubbing against the floor, Lisa had made two, symmetrical scrapes on the end of her nose.

It wasn’t the first time that one of the caretakers had recorded sexual behavior by Lisa. On the first day of her ‘babywatch,’ on November 19, Lisa had tried to provoke Susanne Schnurrenberger by kissing her, touching her breasts, and licking her face. Schnurrenberger didn’t react, and, following the protocol of Scientology procedure, remained silent around Lisa.

Now, more than two weeks later, Laura Arrunada said, under oath, that she’d seen an even more disturbing sight, with Lisa moving against the floor.

On the night of December 4 she also told Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer, that Lisa was looking bad and perhaps needed an IV to get fluids into her. It was a rare admission by one of the Scientologist caretakers that Lisa might actually need to see a real doctor.

Laura’s shift ended at about 6 in the morning on December 5, twenty-seven years ago today.

Heather Hoff, just 17 years old, took over for the day, and she reported that Lisa stayed in bed and wasn’t talking or moving, a big contrast to just a few days earlier. Like Laura, Heather felt compelled to make sure that Lisa was still breathing.

At 5 pm, Laura returned for another shift, and Heather was in the bathroom with Lisa, running the shower while Lisa sat in the tub, looking limp.

Laura was immediately struck by how much worse Lisa looked than just twelve hours earlier. To Laura, with her medical training, Lisa looked septic — like she was suffering from an infection. And while Laura went to help Heather with the shower, Lisa’s diarrhea returned as her bowels emptied while she sat in the tub.

Laura was really alarmed now. She knew that Lisa’s anus relaxing like that could be a sign of real trouble. She told Heather she was going to notify Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer.

“I went to tell Janis that she was not looking good…You know, like she was a, like darkness around her eyes. And I mean, I know that when this anus is relaxed it is some neurological trouble,” Laura later told police.

Laura said that this happened a little after 5 p.m., when she first arrived for her shift. But Janis didn’t arrive at the room for almost two hours, at about 7 p.m. (Janis told police she arrived as soon as she could “break free.”)

Janis checked and found that Lisa didn’t seem to have a fever, but she did appear to be septic, like there was an infection in her blood. Also that she looked very dehydrated.

Janis took Laura aside — they were still trying not to talk in Lisa’s presence — and told her that she wanted to talk to a Scientologist doctor named David Minkoff, an infectious disease specialist at a hospital in Pasco County, about 45 minutes away.

Laura put Lisa into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt while Janis went to call Minkoff.

Two weeks earlier, Janis had met Minkoff for lunch, to talk about referring patients to his pain clinic, another reason Janis might have thought of Minkoff. (Neither Minkoff or Janis mentioned to police what David Houghton, the dentist, had said, that about a week earlier he had talked over with Minkoff the situation in Room 174, and the two of them decided to get some liquid Valium to have on hand to sedate Lisa. The Valium was never used. Minkoff, meanwhile, gave police the impression that the first time he’d heard about Lisa was when Janis called him on the evening of December 5.)

Janis told Minkoff that Lisa needed an antibiotic, but Minkoff told her he’d need to see a patient before prescribing one. She asked him about bringing Lisa to see him, and hoped to keep away from the “hoo-hah” of the emergency room. Minkoff was a Scientologist, and understood what she meant — they wouldn’t want people making noise or speaking to Lisa if they could help it. Minkoff told Janis to bring Lisa down to the hospital, and that he’d be working until 10 p.m.

Janis then put together the go team. She sent Laura to ask Paul Greenwood to join them, asked Emma Schamehorn to draw a map to the hospital in New Port Richey where Dr. Minkoff worked, and then went to get her Mazda minivan from across the street to pull it up to the curb at the cabanas on Osceola Avenue.

Greenwood was a retired chiropractor from Bellingham, Washington who was now a deputy staff section officer and had been doing some coursework when Laura asked him to come help.

When he arrived in Room 174, Lisa McPherson was lying on her bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling and breathing heavily, not saying anything, and not moving.

They could see that Janis was pulling her minivan up to the curb, so Paul lifted Lisa under her arms while Laura lifted her feet. They carried her out to the van and put her sitting up in the middle of the bench seat in the back.

Being careful not to say anything in Lisa’s presence, Laura got into the car so she was sitting next to Lisa on her left. She put her arm around Lisa, whose head rested on her shoulder. Paul got in next to Lisa on her right, and Janis, with the map Emma had drawn for her to the hospital in Pasco County, began driving.

Just five or six minutes away there was a much closer facility — Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater. But it was the one where Lisa had been taken after her car accident on November 18, and Janis would have worried that doctors there would try again to get a psychiatric evaluation. In fact, Janis passed four hospitals that were all closer than the one in New Port Richey, where Dr. Minkoff was waiting.

Asked later about taking such a long drive to get Lisa to a doctor, Laura defended Janis’s decision, saying that they really didn’t know she was so sick.

About halfway through the journey, both Paul and Janis each told police, Lisa’s breathing suddenly changed. They said Lisa started breathing more quickly, but then settled down and it “got very, very soft,” Paul later said.

He took her right wrist into his hand, searching for a pulse. He found it, but it was getting harder and harder to discern. He looked at Laura and signaled for her to look for a pulse as well, again trying to keep silent around Lisa in the Scientology custom.

With about five minutes left in the journey, Laura checked Lisa’s carotid artery and also expressed with a hand gesture that she too was having a hard time finding a pulse.

Neither of them called for Janis to stop the car so they could start lifesaving activities. They just drove on.

When Janis arrived at the emergency room entrance, she ran out to tell the front desk person that she needed help.

The first to the scene was a registered nurse, Theresa Klimaszewski. She went to the van and could see that Lisa was leaning on Laura. Theresa tried to find a pulse, but was unable to. But it was dark, and she assumed that Lisa was just unresponsive.

A moment later, triage nurse Rick Pemberton arrived with a wheelchair. (Janis had been told that the ER didn’t have a spare stretcher to take to the van.) Pemberton later told police that as soon as he reached Lisa and began to put her in the chair, he knew she was already dead. A few minutes later, Theresa was sure of it too. But if Lisa had died, she was pale but not cyanotic (she hadn’t turned blue), suggesting to them that she had just expired. Theresa assumed it had just happened, Rick guessed that it was up to an hour before — but he emphasized to police that he was not a forensic specialist.

Minkoff was told that his patient had arrived, and when he saw Lisa slumped on the wheelchair, he was struck by the appearance of her skin, which bore hemorrhages just under the skin, suggesting sepsis. He took her immediately into the trauma room, had her intubated, and started CPR. About a half hour later, they stopped their efforts.

Other workers at the hospital, who were not Scientologists, backed up Minkoff’s insistence that he had no idea, from Janis’s earlier call, that Lisa was in such bad shape. He was stunned when he first saw her, and let Janis know that he was angry.

Back in the lobby, Janis realized that Lisa McPherson had died when one of the hospital workers began asking her and Laura about how to spell Lisa’s name, and where she lived, and who was her next of kin.

They had forgotten to bring her purse, and neither Janis or Laura knew Lisa very well, despite what they’d been through in recent days. They didn’t know what to say.

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It fell to Tom DeVocht to call Scientology leader David Miscavige in California and inform him of Lisa’s death. From an office at the West Coast Building in Clearwater, DeVocht called Miscavige. Janet Reitman, in her book Inside Scientology, points out that Marty Rathbun was also present in Clearwater, and he also kicked into action.

Mark “Marty” Rathbun had been the second-highest official in Scientology, David Miscavige’s right hand man and a formidable enforcer. He had worked his way back from a fall from grace — he’d “blown” (left) Scientology in 1993, and then had served a kind of banishment on the Freewinds until the summer of 1995. He had watched with concern as Miscavige had supervised Lisa’s auditing.

Miscavige had overseen Lisa McPherson’s auditing, had declared her “Clear,” and now she had died after what looked like a terribly botched attempt to keep her confined in a hotel room while she was going through a mental breakdown. What immediately worried them was any evidence that Lisa’s health had been in the hands of Janis Johnson, the disgraced Arizona doctor who had lost her license to practice medicine following an investigation there that she had stolen pain drugs from her patients.

Rathbun fired up an operation to have any evidence that Johnson had been practicing medicine on Lisa removed from the premises. (The hotel also had plenty of time to completely scrub Lisa’s cabana, and replaced her two double beds with a king-sized bed before police ever got a look at the room.) Rathbun also admitted, in 2009, that he’d had documents destroyed.

Each of the caretakers had been asked to write down statements, and to have filled out daily logs about their shifts. More than a year later, as a police investigation picked up steam, Rathbun looked through the caretaker logs. In a 2009 interview, Rathbun told the St. Petersburg Times about his decision to make some of that information from Lisa’s final days disappear…

Three entries particularly troubled Rathbun. One contained a bizarre sexual reference McPherson had made. Another revealed that no one thought to remove the mirror from the room of a psychotic woman bent on harming herself. The third was one caretaker’s opinion that the situation was out of control and that McPherson needed to see a doctor. Rathbun concluded the notes had to go.

Arrunada’s observation about Lisa’s disturbing sexual movements on the floor occurred on December 3 and 4 — the two days that Rathbun had destroyed. That was also the time when Arrunada suggested to Janis that Lisa needed an IV and real medical care.

Reading the existing caretaker statements, the caretaker logs, the sworn statements, the prosecution summaries, and lengthy police and prosecutor summaries, the material in them is, for the large part, very consistent. The few examples when that’s not the case stick out like a sore thumb.

Janis Johnson, for example, lies like a rug repeatedly in her interview with police to the point where it’s almost physically painful to read. The disgraced former physician repeatedly pushes Scientology’s shore story, that Lisa was at the Fort Harrison to get rest and relaxation, did not want to see a doctor, and only became very ill at the last minute.

This, for example, is how Janis described Lisa’s reaction on the evening of December 5 — several days after the other caretakers said Lisa could barely speak, couldn’t walk, and was completely incoherent…

“She was actually the friendliest she had ever been to me. She actually was happy to see me. She smiled at me, you know? She said ‘hi.’ It was like, whoa, this is different. Maybe she realized she did need some help and she was, you know, at last willing to accept some help.”

At last willing to accept some help. It may be the single most disgusting lie told in the entire investigation. That Lisa McPherson, after 17 days of forced feedings, being held in a room against her will, and being subjected to a cruel silent treatment finally would allow herself to be “helped.”

Another obvious lie: Janis claimed that she had to talk Lisa into the idea of going to see Dr. Minkoff. Janis describes having a conversation with Lisa and overcoming her objections to seeing a doctor by explaining that he was a Scientologist.

Remember, this supposed conversation happens a couple of hours after Lisa was so far gone, she had sat limply in her bathtub and shit herself as Heather Hoff and Laura Arrunada had been bathing her.

But another reason that Janis’s story that she overcame Lisa’s objections is an obvious shore story is that just minutes later in her interview with police, she’s talking about how she and Laura moved out of Lisa’s earshot to discuss how they were going to get her to the New Port Richey Hospital. Oh, that’s right, neither of them were having any kind of conversations with Lisa because none of them had said a word to her in more than two weeks as part of Scientology’s sadistic Introspection Rundown.

And about that, this was Janis Johnson’s response when police asked her about the Introspection Rundown: “I don’t know of any such course…She was simply there to rest.”

Reading Janis Johnson’s lies, you can begin to see why, as Janet Reitman explains in her book, Clearwater Police and state investigators asked the state prosecutor to indict Janis for manslaughter. They also wanted Janis and Laura indicted for practicing medicine without a license, and Laura and Alain Kartuzinski indicted for manslaughter. Instead, the prosecutor chose lesser charges, and against the church rather than individuals. It was a weak choice, Reitman explains, and then later fell apart anyway.

As Reitman explains, Dr. Joan Wood, the Pinellas-Pasco County medical examiner, had made a crucial mistake. She found that Lisa had died from a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in the lungs — that was brought on by bed rest and extreme dehydration. But she also said that Lisa had to have been unconscious for 24 to 48 hours before she died, which didn’t comport with what the caretakers and security guards and Paul Greenwood and others had said in reports and interviews. Scientology, Marty Rathbun has revealed, spent millions trying to destroy Joan Wood and her conclusions. But as Reitman explains, it was the absence of a substance in Lisa’s body — known as ketone proteins — that proved Wood had been wrong about Lisa being unconscious for two days, and lent credence to what the caretakers had said, that Lisa was becoming unresponsive, but was at least conscious and still receiving some small amounts of nutrition up to her last day. After a retest showed again the lack of ketones, “Wood was cornered, and she knew it,” Reitman writes. Forced to change her report, Scientology pounced, and prosecutors knew that they’d be unable to call Wood as a witness. Their case crumbled, and the criminal prosecution was ended in 2000. Wood still maintained that Lisa had died from the pulmonary embolism, but now she removed reference to bed rest and dehydration, and called the death accidental.

But regardless of Wood’s mistakes or the crushing legal onslaught Scientology subjected her to, other experts backed up her assessment that Lisa’s case of dehydration was practically off the charts. Tom Tobin of the St. Petersburg Times submitted the findings of Lisa’s autopsy to five independent doctors who were tops in their field, and they all agreed that Lisa had been extremely dehydrated, and that it had happened over a considerable time. And again, that matched the large amount of material in the caretaker statements, caretaker logs, and police interviews. For more than two weeks, the Scientologist Sea Org workers had gotten Lisa to ingest an inadequate amount of food and water, and gave her things like Cal-Mag which only exacerbated the problem.

Once again, the caretaker information (except for the obvious lies in an interview like Janis Johnson’s) was consistent and rang true. And that’s why another of Wood’s conclusions simply doesn’t work with what we know about how Lisa was handled in Room 174. Wood concluded from the appearance of Lisa’s skin on her arms and legs and nose that she had been bitten by cockroaches. Other experts disagreed, saying her skin was consistent with her ailments. But insect bites also simply didn’t comport with multiple caretakers watching Lisa 24 hours a day in a hotel room. Like Wood’s assumption about Lisa being unconscious, it just didn’t work unless there had been a massive conspiracy by Lisa’s caretakers and security guards and others to lie in statements given up to two years apart. And, like the mistake about Lisa being unconscious for two days, it just doesn’t work.

But it was a salacious detail, and one that shocked the public and tended to reinforce the beliefs of people who wanted to see Scientology as an evil force that would kill one of its own parishioners. So the cockroach bite detail overwhelmed everything else. The public got the perception that Lisa had been held in a dungeon somewhere with insects feeding on her in a swarm.

It just wasn’t the case. The truth was bad enough. Scientologists, robotically following the dictates of a man who had been dead for almost a decade, L. Ron Hubbard, had dealt with Lisa’s madness by forcing herbal supplements and inappropriate liquids into her by holding her down and using a syringe, by confining her to a hotel room day after day, and expecting that she’d “calm down” and become ready for auditing. She did calm down. She became limp. She was dehydrated and had lost weight to the point that she was skeletal. She could no longer stand and had become incontinent. And they watched. They watched as she died in front of them.

That was bad enough. And because of the church’s millions, and because even the state of Florida was so intimidated by Scientology, the people responsible were never charged and never faced justice.

On this December 5, twenty-seven years after her death, we apologize to Lisa McPherson that she never got the care or the justice she deserved. She was owed better.

 
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Technology Cocktail

“I recently indicated that I was doing some research into alleviation of physical difficulties, not because we are in healing but because the AMA should be taught a lesson for attacking us.” — L. Ron Hubbard, 1963

 
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THE PROSECUTION OF DANNY MASTERSON

We first broke the news of the LAPD’s investigation of Scientology celebrity Danny Masterson on rape allegations in 2017, and we’ve been covering the story every step of the way since then. At this page we’ve collected our most important links as Danny faces a potential sentence of 45 years to life in prison. NOW WITH TRIAL INDEX.

 
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THE PODCAST: How many have you heard?

[1] Marc Headley [2] Claire Headley [3] Jeffrey Augustine [4] Bruce Hines [5] Sunny Pereira [6] Pete Griffiths [7] Geoff Levin [8] Patty Moher [9] Marc Headley [10] Jefferson Hawkins [11] Michelle ‘Emma’ Ryan [12] Paulette Cooper [13] Jesse Prince [14] Mark Bunker [15] Jon Atack [16] Mirriam Francis [17] Bruce Hines on MSH

— SPECIAL: The best TV show on Scientology you never got to see

[1] Phil Jones [2] Derek Bloch [3] Carol Nyburg [4] Katrina Reyes [5] Jamie DeWolf

— The first Danny Masterson trial and beyond

[18] Trial special with Chris Shelton [19] Trial week one [20] Marc Headley on the spy in the hallway [21] Trial week two [22] Trial week three [23] Trial week four [24] Leah Remini on LAPD Corruption [25] Mike Rinder 2022 Thanksgiving Special [26] Jane Doe 4 (Tricia Vessey), Part One [27] Jane Doe 4 (Tricia Vessey), Part Two [28] Claire Headley on the trial [29] Tory Christman [30] Bruce Hines on spying [31] Karen de la Carriere [32] Ron Miscavige on Shelly Miscavige [33] Karen de la Carriere on the L’s [34] Mark Bunker on Miscavige hiding [35] Mark Plummer [36] Mark Ebner [37] Karen Pressley [38] Steve Cannane [39] Fredrick Brennan [40] Clarissa Adams [41] Louise Shekter [42] John Sweeney [43] Tory Christman [44] Kate Bornstein [45] Christian Stolte [46] Mark Bunker [47] Jon Atack [48] Luke Y. Thompson [49] Mark Ebner [50] Bruce Hines [51] Spanky Taylor and Karen Pressley [51] Geoff and Robbie Levin [52] Sands Hall [53] Jonny Jacobsen [54] Sandy Holeman

 
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Source Code

“The magic cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries in the Middle East were fascinating. The only modern work that has anything to do with them is a trifle wild in spots, but it’s fascinating work in itself, and that’s work written by Aleister Crowley, the late Aleister Crowley, my very good friend. And he did himself a splendid piece of aesthetics built around those magic cults. It’s very interesting reading to get ahold of a copy of a book, quite rare, but it can be obtained, ‘The Master Therion,’ T-h-e-r-i-o-n, The Master Therion by Aleister Crowley. He signs himself The Beast, the mark of the beast six sixty-six. Very, very something or other, but anyway the, Crowley exhumed a lot of the data from these old magic cults.” — L. Ron Hubbard, December 5, 1952

Avast, Ye Mateys

“DARBY: As the Income-Outgo picture is poor, you should quickly take advantage of the opportunity to attain one or more of the £5 prizes. Not unlike an old Easter Egg hunt, the DARBY offers cash prizes to the lucky winners. Score to date: Rewards — 54 £5 prizes. Penalties — 651 £1 penalties. At least defend your area against penalties! Look on the crew notice board for a surprise. The Darby goes on.” — The Commodore, December 5, 1971

 
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Overheard in the FreeZone

“Ron was interested in producing a philosophy which had practical use. That was something which hasn’t been done in hundreds or thousands of years. Instead, philosophers (both east and west) sit around and issue thunderous principles which have little or no relation to anything in the real world. Religion and philosophy have acted to civilize the world to some extent, to be sure. But the wars, conflicts, crime and insanity which are part and parcel of life on Earth haven’t lessened significantly. Proving that religion and philosophy have generally let Man down. Scientology is a colossal advance. I don’t think even most Scientologists realize how profound it is. And for the most part one guy — one guy — came up with it. It’s just about beyond the imagination. I get amused at those in the Field who complain about the arrogance of Scientologists who claim to have the only road out. While arrogance isn’t desirable, no other group on Earth has more right to be ‘arrogant’ than we have. Ron wasn’t exaggerating about what he said in KSW and Safeguarding Technology.”

 
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Past is Prologue

1996: Worldwide pickets were held to protest the actions of Scientology. A picket report was posted by Jeff Jacobsen from Arizona. “I arrived a bit before 2pm and started picketing. There were maybe 8 cars in the church parking lot, and all day there was almost no traffic either in nor out of the place. Mystery Woman came just after 2 and joined me, then 2 others arrived. So 4 of us picketed until 4, then MW and I stayed until 5. You have to understand that there is almost no foot traffic at the church location, so our main public interaction is with traffic going by. I counted about 14 pro and 4 anti reactions from the passersby, and 2 uncertain. Jinny Leason, church PR person, came out to talk to me for about 10 minutes. she basically wanted to object to both sides of my sign. ‘The Church of the Holy Lawsuit’ she said distorted facts. ‘Stop attacking the Internet’ she felt was not true because the church only goes after copyright violators. So I tried to explain spamming, canceling, fair use, etc. One of the members drove behind our cars and wrote down license plate numbers, then drove into the church parking lot. I took his picture.”

 
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Random Howdy

“I remember like 2009 thinking we were kicking ass on Scientology on YouTube and the whole cult/magical thinking in general…and then I discovered David Icke, and I remember thinking ‘What’s the use?’ Knock one down and another takes its place.”

 
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Full Court Press: What we’re watching at the Underground Bunker

Criminal prosecutions:
— Danny Masterson charged for raping three women: Found guilty on two counts on May 31, remanded to custody. Sentenced to 30 years to life on Sep 7.
— ‘Lafayette Ronald Hubbard’ (a/k/a Justin Craig), aggravated assault, plus drug charges: Grand jury indictments include charges from an assault while in custody. Next pretrial hearing October 30.
— David Gentile, GPB Capital, fraud.

Civil litigation:
— Leah Remini v. Scientology, alleging ‘Fair Game’ harassment and defamation: Complaint filed August 2, Scientology submitting anti-SLAPP response Oct 26.
— Baxter, Baxter, and Paris v. Scientology, alleging labor trafficking: Forced to arbitration. Plaintiffs allowed interlocutory appeal to Eleventh Circuit.
— Valerie Haney v. Scientology: Forced to ‘religious arbitration.’
— Chrissie Bixler et al. v. Scientology and Danny Masterson: Discovery phase.
— Jane Doe 1 v. Scientology, David Miscavige, and Gavin Potter: Case unsealed and second amended complaint filed. Scientology moves for religious arbitration.
— Chiropractors Steve Peyroux and Brent Detelich, stem cell fraud: Ordered to mediation.

 
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SCIENTOLOGY: FAIR GAME

After the success of their double-Emmy-winning, three-season A&E series ‘Scientology and the Aftermath,’ Leah Remini and Mike Rinder continue the conversation on their podcast, ‘Scientology: Fair Game.’ We’ve created a landing page where you can hear all of the episodes so far.

LEAH REMINI: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE AFTERMATH

An episode-by-episode guide to Leah Remini’s three-season, double-Emmy winning series that changed everything for Scientology watching. Originally aired from 2016 to 2019 on the A&E network, and now on Netflix.

SCIENTOLOGY’S CELEBRITIES, from A to Z

Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!

 
Other links: SCIENTOLOGY BLACK OPS: Tom Cruise and dirty tricks. Scientology’s Ideal Orgs, from one end of the planet to the other. Scientology’s sneaky front groups, spreading the good news about L. Ron Hubbard while pretending to benefit society. Scientology Lit: Books reviewed or excerpted in a weekly series. How many have you read?

 
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THE WHOLE TRACK

[ONE year ago] Twenty-seven years ago today: The final hours of Lisa McPherson’s Scientology life
[TWO years ago] Twenty-six years ago today: The final hours of Lisa McPherson’s Scientology life
[THREE years ago] Twenty-five years ago today: The final hours of Lisa McPherson’s Scientology life
[FOUR years ago] Give Scientology $500 and you too could be a ‘Harlem Homie’!
[FIVE years ago] Slimed by Scientology, Cierra Westerman says she’s still feeling good about coming forward
[SIX years ago] The raid on Scientology you probably haven’t heard about — and how the church beat the rap
[SEVEN years ago] EXCLUSIVE: Scientology tried to derail Remini series by calling 14-year-old ‘aggressor’ in rape
[EIGHT years ago] Twenty years ago today: The final hours of Lisa McPherson’s Scientology life
[NINE years ago] Steve Cannane has Scientology book news, and helps us with a Down Under history lesson
[TEN years ago] RUSSELL MILLER’S BARE-FACED MESSIAH, BACK IN PRINT IN FEBRUARY!
[ELEVEN years ago] Lisa McPherson Day: Is Florida Ashamed Yet?

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 5, 2023 at 07:00

E-mail tips to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We also post updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our new book with Paulette Cooper, Battlefield Scientology: Exposing L. Ron Hubbard’s dangerous ‘religion’ is now on sale at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. Our book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2022 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Underground Bunker (2012-2022), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Other links: BLOGGING DIANETICS: Reading Scientology’s founding text cover to cover | UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists | GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice | SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts | Shelly Miscavige, 15 years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Watch our short videos that explain Scientology’s controversies in three minutes or less…

Check your whale level at our dedicated page for status updates, or join us at the Underground Bunker’s Facebook discussion group for more frivolity.

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news | Battling Babe-Hounds: Ross Jeffries v. R. Don Steele

 

Tony Ortega at The Daily Beast

 

Tony Ortega at Rolling Stone

 We want to warn you the story we’re reprinting today is very disturbing and contains graphic descriptions that some may find difficult to deal with. Six years ago we marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Lisa McPherson by recording, in real time, the final weeks of her life. Today marks the 26th anniversary [...]]]>

 
We want to warn you the story we’re reprinting today is very disturbing and contains graphic descriptions that some may find difficult to deal with. Six years ago we marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Lisa McPherson by recording, in real time, the final weeks of her life. Today marks the 26th anniversary of her final day on earth, and we are reproducing the culminating piece of our series which we published six years ago.

It’s a harrowing account of Lisa’s final hours, and not for the squeamish. If you are not familiar with her story, you might go back to the beginning of our series (links are provided below) about this lovely woman whose mental breakdown was treated by Scientology with a grim enforced seclusion at their holiest place, the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. By this point, she was on her 17th day of isolation, with her caretakers not saying a word to her as dictated by the policies of L. Ron Hubbard.

 
What Laura Arrunada, Lisa McPherson’s final caretaker, saw in Room 174 of the Fort Harrison Hotel in the last three days of Lisa’s life was so upsetting, Marty Rathbun made her reports disappear.

Laura had trained to be a doctor in Mexico, and had completed her coursework and a two-year residency, but had stopped short of taking the board exam to become a physician. Ten years later, she was working in the Sea Org at Scientology’s Flag Land Base in its medical liaison office. She had first been asked to work a shift with Lisa McPherson on the day after Thanksgiving.

A week later, she was working with Rita Boykin and Heather Hoff while being overseen by Janis Johnson. Laura’s shifts started in the late afternoon and went until the early morning. And on Lisa’s final two nights, Laura witnessed a disturbing sight.

Sunday night, December 3, 1995, Laura watched as Lisa, who at this point could no longer stand or get around the hotel room on her own, was lying flat on the floor, face down. And her hips began to move.

Laura began to realize what was happening. Lisa was moving as if she was having sex with someone. She was kissing the floor and grinding her pelvis on it. Then, Lisa turned from the floor and began to masturbate.

Laura told police that Lisa repeated the act the next night, Lisa’s last alive. And while pushing and rubbing against the floor, Lisa had made two, symmetrical scrapes on the end of her nose.

It wasn’t the first time that one of the caretakers had recorded sexual behavior by Lisa. On the first day of her ‘babywatch,’ on November 19, Lisa had tried to provoke Susanne Schnurrenberger by kissing her, touching her breasts, and licking her face. Schnurrenberger didn’t react, and, following the protocol of Scientology procedure, remained silent around Lisa.

Now, more than two weeks later, Laura Arrunada said, under oath, that she’d seen an even more disturbing sight, with Lisa moving against the floor.

On the night of December 4 she also told Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer, that Lisa was looking bad and perhaps needed an IV to get fluids into her. It was a rare admission by one of the Scientologist caretakers that Lisa might actually need to see a real doctor.

Laura’s shift ended at about 6 in the morning on December 5, twenty-five years ago today.

Heather Hoff, just 17 years old, took over for the day, and she reported that Lisa stayed in bed and wasn’t talking or moving, a big contrast to just a few days earlier. Like Laura, Heather felt compelled to make sure that Lisa was still breathing.

At 5 pm, Laura returned for another shift, and Heather was in the bathroom with Lisa, running the shower while Lisa sat in the tub, looking limp.

Laura was immediately struck by how much worse Lisa looked than just twelve hours earlier. To Laura, with her medical training, Lisa looked septic — like she was suffering from an infection. And while Laura went to help Heather with the shower, Lisa’s diarrhea returned as her bowels emptied while she sat in the tub.

Laura was really alarmed now. She knew that Lisa’s anus relaxing like that could be a sign of real trouble. She told Heather she was going to notify Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer.

“I went to tell Janis that she was not looking good…You know, like she was a, like darkness around her eyes. And I mean, I know that when this anus is relaxed it is some neurological trouble,” Laura later told police.

Laura said that this happened a little after 5 p.m., when she first arrived for her shift. But Janis didn’t arrive at the room for almost two hours, at about 7 p.m. (Janis told police she arrived as soon as she could “break free.”)

Janis checked and found that Lisa didn’t seem to have a fever, but she did appear to be septic, like there was an infection in her blood. Also that she looked very dehydrated.

Janis took Laura aside — they were still trying not to talk in Lisa’s presence — and told her that she wanted to talk to a Scientologist doctor named David Minkoff, an infectious disease specialist at a hospital in Pasco County, about 45 minutes away.

Laura put Lisa into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt while Janis went to call Minkoff.

Two weeks earlier, Janis had met Minkoff for lunch, to talk about referring patients to his pain clinic, another reason Janis might have thought of Minkoff. (Neither Minkoff or Janis mentioned to police what David Houghton, the dentist, had said, that about a week earlier he had talked over with Minkoff the situation in Room 174, and the two of them decided to get some liquid Valium to have on hand to sedate Lisa. The Valium was never used. Minkoff, meanwhile, gave police the impression that the first time he’d heard about Lisa was when Janis called him on the evening of December 5.)

Janis told Minkoff that Lisa needed an antibiotic, but Minkoff told her he’d need to see a patient before prescribing one. She asked him about bringing Lisa to see him, and hoped to keep away from the “hoo-hah” of the emergency room. Minkoff was a Scientologist, and understood what she meant — they wouldn’t want people making noise or speaking to Lisa if they could help it. Minkoff told Janis to bring Lisa down to the hospital, and that he’d be working until 10 p.m.

Janis then put together the go team. She sent Laura to ask Paul Greenwood to join them, asked Emma Schamehorn to draw a map to the hospital in New Port Richey where Dr. Minkoff worked, and then went to get her Mazda minivan from across the street to pull it up to the curb at the cabanas on Osceola Avenue.

Greenwood was a retired chiropractor from Bellingham, Washington who was now a deputy staff section officer and had been doing some coursework when Laura asked him to come help.

When he arrived in Room 174, Lisa McPherson was lying on her bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling and breathing heavily, not saying anything, and not moving.

They could see that Janis was pulling her minivan up to the curb, so Paul lifted Lisa under her arms while Laura lifted her feet. They carried her out to the van and put her sitting up in the middle of the bench seat in the back.

Being careful not to say anything in Lisa’s presence, Laura got into the car so she was sitting next to Lisa on her left. She put her arm around Lisa, whose head rested on her shoulder. Paul got in next to Lisa on her right, and Janis, with the map Emma had drawn for her to the hospital in Pasco County, began driving.

Just five or six minutes away there was a much closer facility — Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater. But it was the one where Lisa had been taken after her car accident on November 18, and Janis would have worried that doctors there would try again to get a psychiatric evaluation. In fact, Janis passed four hospitals that were all closer than the one in New Port Richey, where Dr. Minkoff was waiting.

Asked later about taking such a long drive to get Lisa to a doctor, Laura defended Janis’s decision, saying that they really didn’t know she was so sick.

About halfway through the journey, both Paul and Janis each told police, Lisa’s breathing suddenly changed. They said Lisa started breathing more quickly, but then settled down and it “got very, very soft,” Paul later said.

He took her right wrist into his hand, searching for a pulse. He found it, but it was getting harder and harder to discern. He looked at Laura and signaled for her to look for a pulse as well, again trying to keep silent around Lisa in the Scientology custom.

With about five minutes left in the journey, Laura checked Lisa’s carotid artery and also expressed with a hand gesture that she too was having a hard time finding a pulse.

Neither of them called for Janis to stop the car so they could start lifesaving activities. They just drove on.

When Janis arrived at the emergency room entrance, she ran out to tell the front desk person that she needed help.

The first to the scene was a registered nurse, Theresa Klimaszewski. She went to the van and could see that Lisa was leaning on Laura. Theresa tried to find a pulse, but was unable to. But it was dark, and she assumed that Lisa was just unresponsive.

A moment later, triage nurse Rick Pemberton arrived with a wheelchair. (Janis had been told that the ER didn’t have a spare stretcher to take to the van.) Pemberton later told police that as soon as he reached Lisa and began to put her in the chair, he knew she was already dead. A few minutes later, Theresa was sure of it too. But if Lisa had died, she was pale but not cyanotic (she hadn’t turned blue), suggesting to them that she had just expired. Theresa assumed it had just happened, Rick guessed that it was up to an hour before — but he emphasized to police that he was not a forensic specialist.

Minkoff was told that his patient had arrived, and when he saw Lisa slumped on the wheelchair, he was struck by the appearance of her skin, which bore hemorrhages just under the skin, suggesting sepsis. He took her immediately into the trauma room, had her intubated, and started CPR. About a half hour later, they stopped their efforts.

Other workers at the hospital, who were not Scientologists, backed up Minkoff’s insistence that he had no idea, from Janis’s earlier call, that Lisa was in such bad shape. He was stunned when he first saw her, and let Janis know that he was angry.

Back in the lobby, Janis realized that Lisa McPherson had died when one of the hospital workers began asking her and Laura about how to spell Lisa’s name, and where she lived, and who was her next of kin.

They had forgotten to bring her purse, and neither Janis or Laura knew Lisa very well, despite what they’d been through in recent days. They didn’t know what to say.

 
It fell to Tom DeVocht to call Scientology leader David Miscavige in California and inform him of Lisa’s death. From an office at the West Coast Building in Clearwater, DeVocht called Miscavige. Janet Reitman, in her book Inside Scientology, points out that Marty Rathbun was also present in Clearwater, and he also kicked into action.

Mark “Marty” Rathbun had been the second-highest official in Scientology, David Miscavige’s right hand man and a formidable enforcer. He had worked his way back from a fall from grace — he’d “blown” (left) Scientology in 1993, and then had served a kind of banishment on the Freewinds until the summer of 1995. He had watched with concern as Miscavige had supervised Lisa’s auditing.

Miscavige had overseen Lisa McPherson’s auditing, had declared her “Clear,” and now she had died after what looked like a terribly botched attempt to keep her confined in a hotel room while she was going through a mental breakdown. What immediately worried them was any evidence that Lisa’s health had been in the hands of Janis Johnson, the disgraced Arizona doctor who had lost her license to practice medicine following an investigation there that she had stolen pain drugs from her patients.

Rathbun fired up an operation to have any evidence that Johnson had been practicing medicine on Lisa removed from the premises. (The hotel also had plenty of time to completely scrub Lisa’s cabana, and replaced her two double beds with a king-sized bed before police ever got a look at the room.) Rathbun also admitted, in 2009, that he’d had documents destroyed.

Each of the caretakers had been asked to write down statements, and to have filled out daily logs about their shifts. More than a year later, as a police investigation picked up steam, Rathbun looked through the caretaker logs. In a 2009 interview, Rathbun told the St. Petersburg Times about his decision to make some of that information from Lisa’s final days disappear…

Three entries particularly troubled Rathbun. One contained a bizarre sexual reference McPherson had made. Another revealed that no one thought to remove the mirror from the room of a psychotic woman bent on harming herself. The third was one caretaker’s opinion that the situation was out of control and that McPherson needed to see a doctor. Rathbun concluded the notes had to go.

Arrunada’s observation about Lisa’s disturbing sexual movements on the floor occurred on December 3 and 4 — the two days that Rathbun had destroyed. That was also the time when Arrunada suggested to Janis that Lisa needed an IV and real medical care.

Reading the existing caretaker statements, the caretaker logs, the sworn statements, the prosecution summaries, and lengthy police and prosecutor summaries, the material in them is, for the large part, very consistent. The few examples when that’s not the case stick out like a sore thumb.

Janis Johnson, for example, lies like a rug repeatedly in her interview with police to the point where it’s almost physically painful to read. The disgraced former physician repeatedly pushes Scientology’s shore story, that Lisa was at the Fort Harrison to get rest and relaxation, did not want to see a doctor, and only became very ill at the last minute.

This, for example, is how Janis described Lisa’s reaction on the evening of December 5 — several days after the other caretakers said Lisa could barely speak, couldn’t walk, and was completely incoherent…

“She was actually the friendliest she had ever been to me. She actually was happy to see me. She smiled at me, you know? She said ‘hi.’ It was like, whoa, this is different. Maybe she realized she did need some help and she was, you know, at last willing to accept some help.”

At last willing to accept some help. It may be the single most disgusting lie told in the entire investigation. That Lisa McPherson, after 17 days of forced feedings, being held in a room against her will, and being subjected to a cruel silent treatment finally would allow herself to be “helped.”

Another obvious lie: Janis claimed that she had to talk Lisa into the idea of going to see Dr. Minkoff. Janis describes having a conversation with Lisa and overcoming her objections to seeing a doctor by explaining that he was a Scientologist.

Remember, this supposed conversation happens a couple of hours after Lisa was so far gone, she had sat limply in her bathtub and shit herself as Heather Hoff and Laura Arrunada had been bathing her.

But another reason that Janis’s story that she overcame Lisa’s objections is an obvious shore story is that just minutes later in her interview with police, she’s talking about how she and Laura moved out of Lisa’s earshot to discuss how they were going to get her to the New Port Richey Hospital. Oh, that’s right, neither of them were having any kind of conversations with Lisa because none of them had said a word to her in more than two weeks as part of Scientology’s sadistic Introspection Rundown.

And about that, this was Janis Johnson’s response when police asked her about the Introspection Rundown: “I don’t know of any such course…She was simply there to rest.”

Reading Janis Johnson’s lies, you can begin to see why, as Janet Reitman explains in her book, Clearwater Police and state investigators asked the state prosecutor to indict Janis for manslaughter. They also wanted Janis and Laura indicted for practicing medicine without a license, and Laura and Alain Kartuzinski indicted for manslaughter. Instead, the prosecutor chose lesser charges, and against the church rather than individuals. It was a weak choice, Reitman explains, and then later fell apart anyway.

As Reitman explains, Dr. Joan Wood, the Pinellas-Pasco County medical examiner, had made a crucial mistake. She found that Lisa had died from a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in the lungs — that was brought on by bed rest and extreme dehydration. But she also said that Lisa had to have been unconscious for 24 to 48 hours before she died, which didn’t comport with what the caretakers and security guards and Paul Greenwood and others had said in reports and interviews. Scientology, Marty Rathbun has revealed, spent millions trying to destroy Joan Wood and her conclusions. But as Reitman explains, it was the absence of a substance in Lisa’s body — known as ketone proteins — that proved Wood had been wrong about Lisa being unconscious for two days, and lent credence to what the caretakers had said, that Lisa was becoming unresponsive, but was at least conscious and still receiving some small amounts of nutrition up to her last day. After a retest showed again the lack of ketones, “Wood was cornered, and she knew it,” Reitman writes. Forced to change her report, Scientology pounced, and prosecutors knew that they’d be unable to call Wood as a witness. Their case crumbled, and the criminal prosecution was ended in 2000. Wood still maintained that Lisa had died from the pulmonary embolism, but now she removed reference to bed rest and dehydration, and called the death accidental.

But regardless of Wood’s mistakes or the crushing legal onslaught Scientology subjected her to, other experts backed up her assessment that Lisa’s case of dehydration was practically off the charts. Tom Tobin of the St. Petersburg Times submitted the findings of Lisa’s autopsy to five independent doctors who were tops in their field, and they all agreed that Lisa had been extremely dehydrated, and that it had happened over a considerable time. And again, that matched the large amount of material in the caretaker statements, caretaker logs, and police interviews. For more than two weeks, the Scientologist Sea Org workers had gotten Lisa to ingest an inadequate amount of food and water, and gave her things like Cal-Mag which only exacerbated the problem.

Once again, the caretaker information (except for the obvious lies in an interview like Janis Johnson’s) was consistent and rang true. And that’s why another of Wood’s conclusions simply doesn’t work with what we know about how Lisa was handled in Room 174. Wood concluded from the appearance of Lisa’s skin on her arms and legs and nose that she had been bitten by cockroaches. Other experts disagreed, saying her skin was consistent with her ailments. But insect bites also simply didn’t comport with multiple caretakers watching Lisa 24 hours a day in a hotel room. Like Wood’s assumption about Lisa being unconscious, it just didn’t work unless there had been a massive conspiracy by Lisa’s caretakers and security guards and others to lie in statements given up to two years apart. And, like the mistake about Lisa being unconscious for two days, it just doesn’t work.

But it was a salacious detail, and one that shocked the public and tended to reinforce the beliefs of people who wanted to see Scientology as an evil force that would kill one of its own parishioners. So the cockroach bite detail overwhelmed everything else. The public got the perception that Lisa had been held in a dungeon somewhere with insects feeding on her in a swarm.

It just wasn’t the case. The truth was bad enough. Scientologists, robotically following the dictates of a man who had been dead for almost a decade, L. Ron Hubbard, had dealt with Lisa’s madness by forcing herbal supplements and inappropriate liquids into her by holding her down and using a syringe, by confining her to a hotel room day after day, and expecting that she’d “calm down” and become ready for auditing. She did calm down. She became limp. She was dehydrated and had lost weight to the point that she was skeletal. She could no longer stand and had become incontinent. And they watched. They watched as she died in front of them.

That was bad enough. And because of the church’s millions, and because even the state of Florida was so intimidated by Scientology, the people responsible were never charged and never faced justice.

On this December 5, twenty-six years after her death, we apologize to Lisa McPherson that she never got the care or the justice she deserved. She was owed better.

Our series on the anniversary of Lisa McPherson’s death.

Nov. 12: Countdown to Room 174: Remembering, in real time, Scientology’s grimmest scandal
Nov. 13: Why it was Scientology leader David Miscavige who declared Lisa McPherson ‘Clear’

 
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Karen de la Carriere with Derek Lambert

 
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Did you know you can get an email every morning when we post our daily Scientology story? We know some of the folks who come to the Underground Bunker aren’t here to talk about the politics of the day, and that’s why we created a daily politics feature over at our other blog, The Lowdown, and we ask readers to take their political discussions over there. And if you drop us a line at tonyo94 AT gmail, we’ll put you on the list so you get a morning reminder that a new Scientology story has been posted — and only for our Scientology stories.

 
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Source Code

“The magic cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries in the Middle East were fascinating. The only modern work that has anything to do with them is a trifle wild in spots, but it’s fascinating work in itself, and that’s work written by Aleister Crowley, the late Aleister Crowley, my very good friend. And he did himself a splendid piece of aesthetics built around those magic cults. It’s very interesting reading to get ahold of a copy of a book, quite rare, but it can be obtained, ‘The Master Therion,’ T-h-e-r-i-o-n, The Master Therion by Aleister Crowley. He signs himself The Beast, the mark of the beast six sixty-six. Very, very something or other, but anyway the, Crowley exhumed a lot of the data from these old magic cults.” — L. Ron Hubbard, December 5, 1952

 
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Avast, Ye Mateys

“DARBY: As the Income-Outgo picture is poor, you should quickly take advantage of the opportunity to attain one or more of the £5 prizes. Not unlike an old Easter Egg hunt, the DARBY offers cash prizes to the lucky winners. Score to date: Rewards — 54 £5 prizes. Penalties — 651 £1 penalties. At least defend your area against penalties! Look on the crew notice board for a surprise. The Darby goes on.” — The Commodore, December 5, 1971

 
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Overheard in the FreeZone

“Ron was interested in producing a philosophy which had practical use. That was something which hasn’t been done in hundreds or thousands of years. Instead, philosophers (both east and west) sit around and issue thunderous principles which have little or no relation to anything in the real world. Religion and philosophy have acted to civilize the world to some extent, to be sure. But the wars, conflicts, crime and insanity which are part and parcel of life on Earth haven’t lessened significantly. Proving that religion and philosophy have generally let Man down. Scientology is a colossal advance. I don’t think even most Scientologists realize how profound it is. And for the most part one guy — one guy — came up with it. It’s just about beyond the imagination. I get amused at those in the Field who complain about the arrogance of Scientologists who claim to have the only road out. While arrogance isn’t desirable, no other group on Earth has more right to be ‘arrogant’ than we have. Ron wasn’t exaggerating about what he said in KSW and Safeguarding Technology.”

Past is Prologue

2000: The St. Petersburg Times reported that Scientology is hoping to bring a Starbucks Coffee shop to downtown Clearwater. “The coffee shop is expected to open this summer at Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue. The 2,400-square-foot coffee shop will be on the southwest corner of Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue, after renovations are completed during a seven-month period. It couldn’t have happened without the city, the Church of Scientology and Matrix Lodging working together. Starbucks first became interested in Clearwater’s downtown as a result of efforts by Scientology to attract them to open a shop in a Scientology facility here. Starbucks ended up agreeing to supply Scientology’s Fort Harrison Hotel with coffee, but the deal fell through to open a separate store downtown in a Scientology building on Cleveland Street. The length of the proposed lease and concerns that protesters against the church might disrupt the shop were among the issues, said Tom DeVocht, who oversees the church’s real estate and construction projects. Scientology officials then encouraged the coffee chain to begin negotiating with Gerald Ellenburg, the CEO of Matrix, to open their shop in Matrix’s building nearby. The city helped make the pitch to the coffee chain.”

 
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Random Howdy

“I remember like 2009 thinking we were kicking ass on Scientology on YouTube and the whole cult/magical thinking in general…and then I discovered David Icke, and I remember thinking ‘What’s the use?’ Knock one down and another takes its place.”

 
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Full Court Press: What we’re watching at the Underground Bunker

Criminal prosecutions:
— Danny Masterson charged for raping three women: Next hearing set for February 8. Trial scheduled for August 29, 2022.
— ‘Lafayette Ronald Hubbard’ (a/k/a Justin Craig), false imprisonment, aggravated assault, plus drug charges: Next hearing scheduled for December 21.
— Jay and Jeff Spina, Medicare fraud: Jay sentenced to 9 years in prison. Jeff’s sentencing to be scheduled.
— Hanan and Rizza Islam and other family members, Medi-Cal fraud: Pretrial conference December 17 in Los Angeles
— David Gentile, GPB Capital, fraud: Next pretrial conference set for February 11.
— Joseph ‘Ben’ Barton, Medicare fraud: Pleaded guilty, awaiting sentencing.

Civil litigation:
— Luis and Rocio Garcia v. Scientology: Eleventh Circuit affirmed ruling granting Scientology’s motion for arbitration. Garcias considering next move.
— Valerie Haney v. Scientology: Forced to ‘religious arbitration.’ US Supreme Court denied Valerie’s petition Oct 4.
— Chrissie Bixler et al. v. Scientology and Danny Masterson: California Supreme Court granted review on May 26 and asked the Second Appellate Division to direct Judge Steven Kleifield to show cause why he granted Scientology’s motion for arbitration. Oral arguments held November 2, awaiting a ruling.
— Matt and Kathy Feschbach tax debt: Eleventh Circuit ruled on Sept 9, 2020 that Feshbachs can’t discharge IRS debt in bankruptcy. Dec 17: Feshbachs sign court judgment obliging them to pay entire $3.674 million tax debt, plus interest from Nov 19.
— Brian Statler Sr v. City of Inglewood: Third amended complaint filed, trial set for June 28, 2022.
— Author Steve Cannane defamation trial: Trial concluded, Cannane victorious, awarded court costs. Case appealed on Dec 23. Appeal hearing held Aug 23-27. Awaiting a ruling.

 
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THE PROSECUTION OF DANNY MASTERSON

We first broke the news of the LAPD’s investigation of Scientology celebrity Danny Masterson on rape allegations in 2017, and we’ve been covering the story every step of the way since then. At this page we’ve collected our most important links, including our four days in Los Angeles covering the preliminary hearing and its ruling, which has Danny facing trial and the potential sentence of 45 years to life in prison.

SCIENTOLOGY: FAIR GAME

After the success of their double-Emmy-winning, three-season A&E series ‘Scientology and the Aftermath,’ Leah Remini and Mike Rinder continue the conversation on their podcast, ‘Scientology: Fair Game.’ We’ve created a landing page where you can hear all of the episodes so far.

LEAH REMINI: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE AFTERMATH

An episode-by-episode guide to Leah Remini’s three-season, double-Emmy winning series that changed everything for Scientology watching. Originally aired from 2016 to 2019 on the A&E network, and now on Netflix.

SCIENTOLOGY’S CELEBRITIES, from A to Z

Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!

 
Other links: SCIENTOLOGY BLACK OPS: Tom Cruise and dirty tricks. Scientology’s Ideal Orgs, from one end of the planet to the other. Scientology’s sneaky front groups, spreading the good news about L. Ron Hubbard while pretending to benefit society. Scientology Lit: Books reviewed or excerpted in a weekly series. How many have you read?

 
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THE WHOLE TRACK

[ONE year ago] Twenty-five years ago today: The final hours of Lisa McPherson’s Scientology life
[TWO years ago] Give Scientology $500 and you too could be a ‘Harlem Homie’!
[THREE years ago] Slimed by Scientology, Cierra Westerman says she’s still feeling good about coming forward
[FOUR years ago] Danny Masterson fired from minor TV show, still no word from glacial D.A.’s office about rapes
[FIVE years ago] EXCLUSIVE: Scientology tried to derail Remini series by calling 14-year-old ‘aggressor’ in rape
[SIX years ago] Twenty years ago today: The final hours of Lisa McPherson’s Scientology life
[SEVEN years ago] Steve Cannane has Scientology book news, and helps us with a Down Under history lesson
[EIGHT years ago] RUSSELL MILLER’S BARE-FACED MESSIAH, BACK IN PRINT IN FEBRUARY!
[NINE years ago] Lisa McPherson Day: Is Florida Ashamed Yet?
[TEN years ago] Scientology’s Shame: Lisa McPherson, 16 Years After Her Death

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 5, 2021 at 07:00

E-mail tips to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We also post updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our new book with Paulette Cooper, Battlefield Scientology: Exposing L. Ron Hubbard’s dangerous ‘religion’ is now on sale at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. Our book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2020 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Underground Bunker (2012-2020), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Other links: BLOGGING DIANETICS: Reading Scientology’s founding text cover to cover | UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists | GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice | SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts | Shelly Miscavige, 15 years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Watch our short videos that explain Scientology’s controversies in three minutes or less…

Check your whale level at our dedicated page for status updates, or join us at the Underground Bunker’s Facebook discussion group for more frivolity.

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news | Battling Babe-Hounds: Ross Jeffries v. R. Don Steele

 

Tony Ortega at The Daily Beast

 We want to warn you the story we’re reprinting today is very disturbing and contains graphic descriptions that some may find difficult to deal with. Five years ago we marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Lisa McPherson by recording, in real time, the final weeks of her life. Today marks the 25th anniversary [...]]]>

 
We want to warn you the story we’re reprinting today is very disturbing and contains graphic descriptions that some may find difficult to deal with. Five years ago we marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Lisa McPherson by recording, in real time, the final weeks of her life. Today marks the 25th anniversary of her final day on earth, and we are reproducing the culminating piece of our series which we published five years ago.

It’s a harrowing account of Lisa’s final hours, and not for the squeamish. If you are not familiar with her story, you might go back to the beginning of our series (links are provided below) about this lovely woman whose mental breakdown was treated by Scientology with a grim enforced seclusion at their holiest place, the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. By this point, she was on her 17th day of isolation, with her caretakers not saying a word to her as dictated by the policies of L. Ron Hubbard.

 
What Laura Arrunada, Lisa McPherson’s final caretaker, saw in Room 174 of the Fort Harrison Hotel in the last three days of Lisa’s life was so upsetting, Marty Rathbun made her reports disappear.

Laura had trained to be a doctor in Mexico, and had completed her coursework and a two-year residency, but had stopped short of taking the board exam to become a physician. Ten years later, she was working in the Sea Org at Scientology’s Flag Land Base in its medical liaison office. She had first been asked to work a shift with Lisa McPherson on the day after Thanksgiving.

A week later, she was working with Rita Boykin and Heather Hoff while being overseen by Janis Johnson. Laura’s shifts started in the late afternoon and went until the early morning. And on Lisa’s final two nights, Laura witnessed a disturbing sight.

Sunday night, December 3, 1995, Laura watched as Lisa, who at this point could no longer stand or get around the hotel room on her own, was lying flat on the floor, face down. And her hips began to move.

Laura began to realize what was happening. Lisa was moving as if she was having sex with someone. She was kissing the floor and grinding her pelvis on it. Then, Lisa turned from the floor and began to masturbate.

Laura told police that Lisa repeated the act the next night, Lisa’s last alive. And while pushing and rubbing against the floor, Lisa had made two, symmetrical scrapes on the end of her nose.

It wasn’t the first time that one of the caretakers had recorded sexual behavior by Lisa. On the first day of her ‘babywatch,’ on November 19, Lisa had tried to provoke Susanne Schnurrenberger by kissing her, touching her breasts, and licking her face. Schnurrenberger didn’t react, and, following the protocol of Scientology procedure, remained silent around Lisa.

Now, more than two weeks later, Laura Arrunada said, under oath, that she’d seen an even more disturbing sight, with Lisa moving against the floor.

On the night of December 4 she also told Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer, that Lisa was looking bad and perhaps needed an IV to get fluids into her. It was a rare admission by one of the Scientologist caretakers that Lisa might actually need to see a real doctor.

Laura’s shift ended at about 6 in the morning on December 5, twenty-five years ago today.

Heather Hoff, just 17 years old, took over for the day, and she reported that Lisa stayed in bed and wasn’t talking or moving, a big contrast to just a few days earlier. Like Laura, Heather felt compelled to make sure that Lisa was still breathing.

At 5 pm, Laura returned for another shift, and Heather was in the bathroom with Lisa, running the shower while Lisa sat in the tub, looking limp.

Laura was immediately struck by how much worse Lisa looked than just twelve hours earlier. To Laura, with her medical training, Lisa looked septic — like she was suffering from an infection. And while Laura went to help Heather with the shower, Lisa’s diarrhea returned as her bowels emptied while she sat in the tub.

Laura was really alarmed now. She knew that Lisa’s anus relaxing like that could be a sign of real trouble. She told Heather she was going to notify Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer.

“I went to tell Janis that she was not looking good…You know, like she was a, like darkness around her eyes. And I mean, I know that when this anus is relaxed it is some neurological trouble,” Laura later told police.

Laura said that this happened a little after 5 p.m., when she first arrived for her shift. But Janis didn’t arrive at the room for almost two hours, at about 7 p.m. (Janis told police she arrived as soon as she could “break free.”)

Janis checked and found that Lisa didn’t seem to have a fever, but she did appear to be septic, like there was an infection in her blood. Also that she looked very dehydrated.

Janis took Laura aside — they were still trying not to talk in Lisa’s presence — and told her that she wanted to talk to a Scientologist doctor named David Minkoff, an infectious disease specialist at a hospital in Pasco County, about 45 minutes away.

Laura put Lisa into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt while Janis went to call Minkoff.

Two weeks earlier, Janis had met Minkoff for lunch, to talk about referring patients to his pain clinic, another reason Janis might have thought of Minkoff. (Neither Minkoff or Janis mentioned to police what David Houghton, the dentist, had said, that about a week earlier he had talked over with Minkoff the situation in Room 174, and the two of them decided to get some liquid Valium to have on hand to sedate Lisa. The Valium was never used. Minkoff, meanwhile, gave police the impression that the first time he’d heard about Lisa was when Janis called him on the evening of December 5.)

Janis told Minkoff that Lisa needed an antibiotic, but Minkoff told her he’d need to see a patient before prescribing one. She asked him about bringing Lisa to see him, and hoped to keep away from the “hoo-hah” of the emergency room. Minkoff was a Scientologist, and understood what she meant — they wouldn’t want people making noise or speaking to Lisa if they could help it. Minkoff told Janis to bring Lisa down to the hospital, and that he’d be working until 10 p.m.

Janis then put together the go team. She sent Laura to ask Paul Greenwood to join them, asked Emma Schamehorn to draw a map to the hospital in New Port Richey where Dr. Minkoff worked, and then went to get her Mazda minivan from across the street to pull it up to the curb at the cabanas on Osceola Avenue.

Greenwood was a retired chiropractor from Bellingham, Washington who was now a deputy staff section officer and had been doing some coursework when Laura asked him to come help.

When he arrived in Room 174, Lisa McPherson was lying on her bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling and breathing heavily, not saying anything, and not moving.

They could see that Janis was pulling her minivan up to the curb, so Paul lifted Lisa under her arms while Laura lifted her feet. They carried her out to the van and put her sitting up in the middle of the bench seat in the back.

Being careful not to say anything in Lisa’s presence, Laura got into the car so she was sitting next to Lisa on her left. She put her arm around Lisa, whose head rested on her shoulder. Paul got in next to Lisa on her right, and Janis, with the map Emma had drawn for her to the hospital in Pasco County, began driving.

Just five or six minutes away there was a much closer facility — Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater. But it was the one where Lisa had been taken after her car accident on November 18, and Janis would have worried that doctors there would try again to get a psychiatric evaluation. In fact, Janis passed four hospitals that were all closer than the one in New Port Richey, where Dr. Minkoff was waiting.

Asked later about taking such a long drive to get Lisa to a doctor, Laura defended Janis’s decision, saying that they really didn’t know she was so sick.

About halfway through the journey, both Paul and Janis each told police, Lisa’s breathing suddenly changed. They said Lisa started breathing more quickly, but then settled down and it “got very, very soft,” Paul later said.

He took her right wrist into his hand, searching for a pulse. He found it, but it was getting harder and harder to discern. He looked at Laura and signaled for her to look for a pulse as well, again trying to keep silent around Lisa in the Scientology custom.

With about five minutes left in the journey, Laura checked Lisa’s carotid artery and also expressed with a hand gesture that she too was having a hard time finding a pulse.

Neither of them called for Janis to stop the car so they could start lifesaving activities. They just drove on.

When Janis arrived at the emergency room entrance, she ran out to tell the front desk person that she needed help.

The first to the scene was a registered nurse, Theresa Klimaszewski. She went to the van and could see that Lisa was leaning on Laura. Theresa tried to find a pulse, but was unable to. But it was dark, and she assumed that Lisa was just unresponsive.

A moment later, triage nurse Rick Pemberton arrived with a wheelchair. (Janis had been told that the ER didn’t have a spare stretcher to take to the van.) Pemberton later told police that as soon as he reached Lisa and began to put her in the chair, he knew she was already dead. A few minutes later, Theresa was sure of it too. But if Lisa had died, she was pale but not cyanotic (she hadn’t turned blue), suggesting to them that she had just expired. Theresa assumed it had just happened, Rick guessed that it was up to an hour before — but he emphasized to police that he was not a forensic specialist.

Minkoff was told that his patient had arrived, and when he saw Lisa slumped on the wheelchair, he was struck by the appearance of her skin, which bore hemorrhages just under the skin, suggesting sepsis. He took her immediately into the trauma room, had her intubated, and started CPR. About a half hour later, they stopped their efforts.

Other workers at the hospital, who were not Scientologists, backed up Minkoff’s insistence that he had no idea, from Janis’s earlier call, that Lisa was in such bad shape. He was stunned when he first saw her, and let Janis know that he was angry.

Back in the lobby, Janis realized that Lisa McPherson had died when one of the hospital workers began asking her and Laura about how to spell Lisa’s name, and where she lived, and who was her next of kin.

They had forgotten to bring her purse, and neither Janis or Laura knew Lisa very well, despite what they’d been through in recent days. They didn’t know what to say.

 
It fell to Tom DeVocht to call Scientology leader David Miscavige in California and inform him of Lisa’s death. From an office at the West Coast Building in Clearwater, DeVocht called Miscavige. Janet Reitman, in her book Inside Scientology, points out that Marty Rathbun was also present in Clearwater, and he also kicked into action.

Mark “Marty” Rathbun had been the second-highest official in Scientology, David Miscavige’s right hand man and a formidable enforcer. He had worked his way back from a fall from grace — he’d “blown” (left) Scientology in 1993, and then had served a kind of banishment on the Freewinds until the summer of 1995. He had watched with concern as Miscavige had supervised Lisa’s auditing.

Miscavige had overseen Lisa McPherson’s auditing, had declared her “Clear,” and now she had died after what looked like a terribly botched attempt to keep her confined in a hotel room while she was going through a mental breakdown. What immediately worried them was any evidence that Lisa’s health had been in the hands of Janis Johnson, the disgraced Arizona doctor who had lost her license to practice medicine following an investigation there that she had stolen pain drugs from her patients.

Rathbun fired up an operation to have any evidence that Johnson had been practicing medicine on Lisa removed from the premises. (The hotel also had plenty of time to completely scrub Lisa’s cabana, and replaced her two double beds with a king-sized bed before police ever got a look at the room.) Rathbun also admitted, in 2009, that he’d had documents destroyed.

Each of the caretakers had been asked to write down statements, and to have filled out daily logs about their shifts. More than a year later, as a police investigation picked up steam, Rathbun looked through the caretaker logs. In a 2009 interview, Rathbun told the St. Petersburg Times about his decision to make some of that information from Lisa’s final days disappear…

Three entries particularly troubled Rathbun. One contained a bizarre sexual reference McPherson had made. Another revealed that no one thought to remove the mirror from the room of a psychotic woman bent on harming herself. The third was one caretaker’s opinion that the situation was out of control and that McPherson needed to see a doctor. Rathbun concluded the notes had to go.

Arrunada’s observation about Lisa’s disturbing sexual movements on the floor occurred on December 3 and 4 — the two days that Rathbun had destroyed. That was also the time when Arrunada suggested to Janis that Lisa needed an IV and real medical care.

Reading the existing caretaker statements, the caretaker logs, the sworn statements, the prosecution summaries, and lengthy police and prosecutor summaries, the material in them is, for the large part, very consistent. The few examples when that’s not the case stick out like a sore thumb.

Janis Johnson, for example, lies like a rug repeatedly in her interview with police to the point where it’s almost physically painful to read. The disgraced former physician repeatedly pushes Scientology’s shore story, that Lisa was at the Fort Harrison to get rest and relaxation, did not want to see a doctor, and only became very ill at the last minute.

This, for example, is how Janis described Lisa’s reaction on the evening of December 5 — several days after the other caretakers said Lisa could barely speak, couldn’t walk, and was completely incoherent…

“She was actually the friendliest she had ever been to me. She actually was happy to see me. She smiled at me, you know? She said ‘hi.’ It was like, whoa, this is different. Maybe she realized she did need some help and she was, you know, at last willing to accept some help.”

At last willing to accept some help. It may be the single most disgusting lie told in the entire investigation. That Lisa McPherson, after 17 days of forced feedings, being held in a room against her will, and being subjected to a cruel silent treatment finally would allow herself to be “helped.”

Another obvious lie: Janis claimed that she had to talk Lisa into the idea of going to see Dr. Minkoff. Janis describes having a conversation with Lisa and overcoming her objections to seeing a doctor by explaining that he was a Scientologist.

Remember, this supposed conversation happens a couple of hours after Lisa was so far gone, she had sat limply in her bathtub and shit herself as Heather Hoff and Laura Arrunada had been bathing her.

But another reason that Janis’s story that she overcame Lisa’s objections is an obvious shore story is that just minutes later in her interview with police, she’s talking about how she and Laura moved out of Lisa’s earshot to discuss how they were going to get her to the New Port Richey Hospital. Oh, that’s right, neither of them were having any kind of conversations with Lisa because none of them had said a word to her in more than two weeks as part of Scientology’s sadistic Introspection Rundown.

And about that, this was Janis Johnson’s response when police asked her about the Introspection Rundown: “I don’t know of any such course…She was simply there to rest.”

Reading Janis Johnson’s lies, you can begin to see why, as Janet Reitman explains in her book, Clearwater Police and state investigators asked the state prosecutor to indict Janis for manslaughter. They also wanted Janis and Laura indicted for practicing medicine without a license, and Laura and Alain Kartuzinski indicted for manslaughter. Instead, the prosecutor chose lesser charges, and against the church rather than individuals. It was a weak choice, Reitman explains, and then later fell apart anyway.

As Reitman explains, Dr. Joan Wood, the Pinellas-Pasco County medical examiner, had made a crucial mistake. She found that Lisa had died from a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in the lungs — that was brought on by bed rest and extreme dehydration. But she also said that Lisa had to have been unconscious for 24 to 48 hours before she died, which didn’t comport with what the caretakers and security guards and Paul Greenwood and others had said in reports and interviews. Scientology, Marty Rathbun has revealed, spent millions trying to destroy Joan Wood and her conclusions. But as Reitman explains, it was the absence of a substance in Lisa’s body — known as ketone proteins — that proved Wood had been wrong about Lisa being unconscious for two days, and lent credence to what the caretakers had said, that Lisa was becoming unresponsive, but was at least conscious and still receiving some small amounts of nutrition up to her last day. After a retest showed again the lack of ketones, “Wood was cornered, and she knew it,” Reitman writes. Forced to change her report, Scientology pounced, and prosecutors knew that they’d be unable to call Wood as a witness. Their case crumbled, and the criminal prosecution was ended in 2000. Wood still maintained that Lisa had died from the pulmonary embolism, but now she removed reference to bed rest and dehydration, and called the death accidental.

But regardless of Wood’s mistakes or the crushing legal onslaught Scientology subjected her to, other experts backed up her assessment that Lisa’s case of dehydration was practically off the charts. Tom Tobin of the St. Petersburg Times submitted the findings of Lisa’s autopsy to five independent doctors who were tops in their field, and they all agreed that Lisa had been extremely dehydrated, and that it had happened over a considerable time. And again, that matched the large amount of material in the caretaker statements, caretaker logs, and police interviews. For more than two weeks, the Scientologist Sea Org workers had gotten Lisa to ingest an inadequate amount of food and water, and gave her things like Cal-Mag which only exacerbated the problem.

Once again, the caretaker information (except for the obvious lies in an interview like Janis Johnson’s) was consistent and rang true. And that’s why another of Wood’s conclusions simply doesn’t work with what we know about how Lisa was handled in Room 174. Wood concluded from the appearance of Lisa’s skin on her arms and legs and nose that she had been bitten by cockroaches. Other experts disagreed, saying her skin was consistent with her ailments. But insect bites also simply didn’t comport with multiple caretakers watching Lisa 24 hours a day in a hotel room. Like Wood’s assumption about Lisa being unconscious, it just didn’t work unless there had been a massive conspiracy by Lisa’s caretakers and security guards and others to lie in statements given up to two years apart. And, like the mistake about Lisa being unconscious for two days, it just doesn’t work.

But it was a salacious detail, and one that shocked the public and tended to reinforce the beliefs of people who wanted to see Scientology as an evil force that would kill one of its own parishioners. So the cockroach bite detail overwhelmed everything else. The public got the perception that Lisa had been held in a dungeon somewhere with insects feeding on her in a swarm.

It just wasn’t the case. The truth was bad enough. Scientologists, robotically following the dictates of a man who had been dead for almost a decade, L. Ron Hubbard, had dealt with Lisa’s madness by forcing herbal supplements and inappropriate liquids into her by holding her down and using a syringe, by confining her to a hotel room day after day, and expecting that she’d “calm down” and become ready for auditing. She did calm down. She became limp. She was dehydrated and had lost weight to the point that she was skeletal. She could no longer stand and had become incontinent. And they watched. They watched as she died in front of them.

That was bad enough. And because of the church’s millions, and because even the state of Florida was so intimidated by Scientology, the people responsible were never charged and never faced justice.

On this December 5, twenty-five years after her death, we apologize to Lisa McPherson that she never got the care or the justice she deserved. She was owed better.

Our series on the anniversary of Lisa McPherson’s death.

Nov. 12: Countdown to Room 174: Remembering, in real time, Scientology’s grimmest scandal
Nov. 13: Why it was Scientology leader David Miscavige who declared Lisa McPherson ‘Clear’

 
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Source Code

“The magic cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries in the Middle East were fascinating. The only modern work that has anything to do with them is a trifle wild in spots, but it’s fascinating work in itself, and that’s work written by Aleister Crowley, the late Aleister Crowley, my very good friend. And he did himself a splendid piece of aesthetics built around those magic cults. It’s very interesting reading to get ahold of a copy of a book, quite rare, but it can be obtained, ‘The Master Therion,’ T-h-e-r-i-o-n, The Master Therion by Aleister Crowley. He signs himself The Beast, the mark of the beast six sixty-six. Very, very something or other, but anyway the, Crowley exhumed a lot of the data from these old magic cults.” — L. Ron Hubbard, December 5, 1952

 
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Avast, Ye Mateys

“DARBY: As the Income-Outgo picture is poor, you should quickly take advantage of the opportunity to attain one or more of the £5 prizes. Not unlike an old Easter Egg hunt, the DARBY offers cash prizes to the lucky winners. Score to date: Rewards — 54 £5 prizes. Penalties — 651 £1 penalties. At least defend your area against penalties! Look on the crew notice board for a surprise. The Darby goes on.” — The Commodore, December 5, 1971

 
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Overheard in the FreeZone

“Hubbard invented the Clear state for marketing reasons. Hubbard did a lot for marketing reasons. People get an out of body experience, or a big win, or simply mind time travel really well, like really tap into that past experience, and they are so blown away by this experience that they think they have gone Clear. Lots of Clears are just delusional people, victims of their own imaginations and desperation to be better than what they are. Many people love the label of Clear and OT so easily FN to being Clear when tested out. In fact the lower toned the person is, the more desperate they are and the more easily deluded they are that they are more likely to call themselves Clear while doing Scientology far too early in the adventure. Basically they are rabbiting away from doing the tech they need more than anyone else.”

 
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Past is Prologue

1997: Scientology appears to have destroyed years of public relations efforts with the city of Clearwater by staging pickets of the police and the Times: “City leaders Monday said the Church of Scientology’s angry protests of the Police Department over the weekend badly damaged Scientology’s image in Clearwater and set back the church’s efforts to become part of the city’s mainstream. The church continued to blast police Chief Sid Klein on Monday with another in a series of public letters accusing him of ‘orchestrating harassment’ against the church and its members. Church representatives also passed out fliers at the city’s downtown office complex and at police headquarters, asking for reports of corruption, abuses and discrimination in Klein’s department. City officials responded in strong terms to the church’s allegations. ‘If they can prove what they say, Sid ought to be in prison,’ City Commissioner Ed Hooper said. ‘If they can’t, they need to let this go. You either go to the state attorney’s office (with the evidence) or you get over it. They just can’t make wild allegations that can’t be substantiated.'”

 
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Random Howdy

“I remember like 2009 thinking we were kicking ass on Scientology on YouTube and the whole cult/magical thinking in general…and then I discovered David Icke, and I remember thinking ‘What’s the use?’ Knock one down and another takes its place.”

 
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Full Court Press: What we’re watching at the Underground Bunker

Criminal prosecutions:
— Danny Masterson charged for raping three women: Masterson’s demurrer denied Oct 19, arraignment delayed to Jan 6.
— Jay and Jeff Spina, Medicare fraud: Jay’s sentencing delayed for ‘Fatico’ hearing on Jan 19.
— Hanan and Rizza Islam and other family members, Medi-Cal fraud: Next pretrial conference set for Jan 12 in Los Angeles

Civil litigation:
— Luis and Rocio Garcia v. Scientology: Oral arguments were heard on July 30 at the Eleventh Circuit
— Valerie Haney v. Scientology: Forced to ‘religious arbitration.’ Petition for writ of mandate denied Oct 22 by Cal 2nd Appellate District. Petition for review by state supreme court filed Oct 30.
— Chrissie Bixler et al. v. Scientology and Danny Masterson: Dec 18, re-hearing on motions to compel arbitration; Jan 29, Masterson’s request to stay discovery pending the criminal case
— Matt and Kathy Feschbach tax debt: Eleventh Circuit ruled on Sept 9 that Feshbachs can’t discharge IRS debt in bankruptcy. Nov 18: Feshbachs indicated they will enter into consent judgment to pay the debt.
— Brian Statler Sr v. City of Inglewood: Second amended complaint filed, trial set for Nov 9, 2021.

Concluded litigation:
— Author Steve Cannane defamation trial: Trial concluded, Cannane victorious, awarded court costs.
— Dennis Nobbe, Medicare fraud, PPP loan fraud: Charged July 29. Bond revoked Sep 14. Nobbe dead, Sep 14.
— Jane Doe v. Scientology (in Miami): Jane Doe dismissed the lawsuit on May 15 after the Clearwater Police dropped their criminal investigation of her allegations.

 
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SCIENTOLOGY BLACK OPS: Tom Cruise and dirty tricks

The Australian Seven News network cancelled a 10-part investigation of Scientology and its history of dirty tricks. Read the transcripts of the episodes and judge for yourself why Tom Cruise and Tommy Davis might not have wanted viewers to see this hard-hitting series by journalist Bryan Seymour.

SCIENTOLOGY: FAIR GAME

After the success of their double-Emmy-winning, three-season A&E series ‘Scientology and the Aftermath,’ Leah Remini and Mike Rinder continue the conversation on their podcast, ‘Scientology: Fair Game.’ We’ve created a landing page where you can hear all of the episodes so far.

LEAH REMINI: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE AFTERMATH

An episode-by-episode guide to Leah Remini’s three-season, double-Emmy winning series that changed everything for Scientology watching. Originally aired from 2016 to 2019 on the A&E network, and now on Netflix.

SCIENTOLOGY’S CELEBRITIES, from A to Z

Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!

 
Other links: Scientology’s Ideal Orgs, from one end of the planet to the other. Scientology’s sneaky front groups, spreading the good news about L. Ron Hubbard while pretending to benefit society. Scientology Lit: Books reviewed or excerpted in a weekly series. How many have you read?

 
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THE WHOLE TRACK

[ONE year ago] Give Scientology $500 and you too could be a ‘Harlem Homie’!
[TWO years ago] Slimed by Scientology, Cierra Westerman says she’s still feeling good about coming forward
[THREE years ago] The raid on Scientology you probably haven’t heard about — and how the church beat the rap
[FOUR years ago] EXCLUSIVE: Scientology tried to derail Remini series by calling 14-year-old ‘aggressor’ in rape
[FIVE years ago] Twenty years ago today: The final hours of Lisa McPherson’s Scientology life
[SIX years ago] Steve Cannane has Scientology book news, and helps us with a Down Under history lesson
[SEVEN years ago] RUSSELL MILLER’S BARE-FACED MESSIAH, BACK IN PRINT IN FEBRUARY!
[EIGHT years ago] Lisa McPherson Day: Is Florida Ashamed Yet?
[NINE years ago] Scientology’s Shame: Lisa McPherson, 16 Years After Her Death

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 5, 2020 at 07:00

E-mail tips to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We also post updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our new book with Paulette Cooper, Battlefield Scientology: Exposing L. Ron Hubbard’s dangerous ‘religion’ is now on sale at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. Our book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2019 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Underground Bunker (2012-2019), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Other links: BLOGGING DIANETICS: Reading Scientology’s founding text cover to cover | UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists | GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice | SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts | Shelly Miscavige, 15 years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Watch our short videos that explain Scientology’s controversies in three minutes or less…

Check your whale level at our dedicated page for status updates, or join us at the Underground Bunker’s Facebook discussion group for more frivolity.

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news | Battling Babe-Hounds: Ross Jeffries v. R. Don Steele

Tuesday night’s Scientology and the Aftermath episode was another stunner, and contained surprises even for some of us jaded, longtime Scientology Watchers.

Sure, many of us knew a lot about the terrible Lisa McPherson story, and that her 1995 death spawned a reaction in the form of years of protests in [...]]]>

Tuesday night’s Scientology and the Aftermath episode was another stunner, and contained surprises even for some of us jaded, longtime Scientology Watchers.

Sure, many of us knew a lot about the terrible Lisa McPherson story, and that her 1995 death spawned a reaction in the form of years of protests in Clearwater, Florida, some of them put on by the Lisa McPherson Trust, a feisty organization funded by a Boston businessman, Bob Minton. And we knew that Minton was put under such a ferocious “Fair Game” campaign by Scientology’s secret police, the Office of Special Affairs, he ended up switching sides before his untimely death of a heart attack in 2010.

But Leah Remini’s costar, and former head of OSA, Mike Rinder, stunned us with details about the operation that he personally oversaw against Minton, and offered his apologies for, he admitted, destroying the man. It made for amazing television.

And we figured the people who lived it might have some interesting things to say about the episode. So we asked former LMT employees like Robert Peterson, Jeff Jacobsen, Jesse Prince, Mark Bunker (who appeared in the episode) and also McPherson family attorney Ken Dandar.

Jeff Jacobsen, for example, was a Phoenix critic of Scientology we first wrote about in 1999. It was Jeff who noticed in 1996 that the year before, in the mysterious death of a woman in Clearwater, the woman’s address was one he recognized — the woman, Lisa McPherson, had died at Scientology’s holiest site, the Fort Harrison Hotel. Jeff alerted a Tampa Tribune reporter, and soon the death of McPherson became one of Scientology’s biggest scandals.

Jeff told us he really enjoyed the episode. “It’s 40 minutes of trying to boil down two years of craziness, but I thought they did a good job. The one thing that really surprised me was the thing about the Swiss money.”

Ah yes, the frozen assets! Mike really shocked us all with that particular detail.

In 2009, Tampa Bay Times reporter Tom Tobin wrote an article titled “How Scientology Got To Bob Minton.” Tobin talked to Mike Rinder and Marty Rathbun, who had only recently gone public after defecting from Scientology as high-level executives.

In the article, Rinder described using private investigators to look into Minton’s finances, and found a way to apply pressure to him. But in 2009, Rinder wouldn’t give Tobin details about how it had been done.

“There were things that, really, he was worried about and had caused problems for him in the investigation that we had done,” Rinder said, declining to give more detail. “I’m just going to leave it at that.”

So it was only in this week’s ‘Aftermath’ episode that Mike finally revealed more, saying that Scientology’s private investigator, Dave Lubow, had persuaded the Nigerian government that Minton had scammed them in bond sales. The Nigerian government then asked a prosecutor in Switzerland to open an investigation and freeze Minton’s funds.

“He had no money. That was the real pressure that was put on him,” Rinder said.

Mark Bunker tells us he didn’t know that detail until he taped the show. “I just knew that Bob wanted out, but I didn’t know the way that they had done it,” he told us, and added how much it meant to him that Rinder had spoken up and apologized. “I was deeply moved by Mike’s comments during the taping of the show. I’m so glad that he came out and said what he did.”

Former LMT employee Robert Peterson also praised the show, but expressed some doubts about the Swiss money story, saying that Minton had told him he had money in other places. Ken Dandar tells us that he does believe Minton’s money was focused in Switzerland, and that freezing the assets there hobbled him.

“I got a call just before Easter. I think it was Good Friday,” Dandar says, remembering how things turned in 2002. Minton was calling him from the New York office of a Scientology attorney. “Bob was crying. He said his lawyer from Boston was with him. ‘Ken,’ he said, ‘Monday morning you have to dismiss the McPherson case. They have all of my money. And if you don’t dismiss the case, the blood of my daughters, and my wife and myself will be on your hands.’

“I said to him, Your lawyer’s sitting there? You need to call the cops right now. You are being extorted. And number two, as much as I appreciate all that you’ve done, you are not my client and I will never dismiss the case.

“And he hung up on me. The next Monday, he was in Florida meeting at [Scientology attorney] Wally Pope’s office, planning with Scientology on how to bring me down.”

Jesse Prince told us that what Tuesday night’s episode glossed over was how much damage it did to people when Bob Minton and Stacy Brooks flipped.

“At the Lisa McPherson Trust we kept meticulous records of all the people and their families who had come to us. It was an intelligence trove of information about people who were trying to leave Scientology. All of it was turned over to OSA by Bob and Stacy,” he says.

“And not only did Bob and Stacy retract their affidavits and change them, but they tried to make me do it too. They had me down there in a hotel by the beach, and I had a microphone on myself that I had gotten from Frank Oliver. Because I didn’t think anyone would believe what Bob and Stacy were saying to me. Bob was telling me that I had to retract all of my testimony in the McPherson case, the Wollersheim case — to get Bob out of trouble.”

Jesse says he told Minton that he would never change his testimony. “I told him, You think you can use me as a fucking bargaining chip? At that point Bob threatened to call the police. So I walked away and never talked to Bob again.”

And the recording? “I gave the recording to Ken Dandar. They were going after Ken so hard. They wanted me to give false testimony against Ken to crush the McPherson case.”

After the episode aired Tuesday night, Jesse told us he was disappointed that it didn’t go into more detail about just how destructive Scientology’s plots had been, and how much damage Bob and Stacy had done after they flipped. And he didn’t like that the episode made Bob and Stacy seem to be heroic figures.

“That fairy tale they told on TV? It made me nauseous,” he said.

“Jesse is absolutely correct,” Dandar tells us. “The episode made Scientology look bad, but not nearly as bad as they really are.”

Others were more charitable. “I thought it was great,” Jeff Jacobsen told us. “There’s no way to squeeze all the craziness from that time into an hour program. This was just right.”

Robert Peterson was also complimentary. “It is virtually impossible to convey the intensity of those times,” he told us. “I thought it was a positive show. I don’t have any hard feelings against Mike Rinder or anyone from Scientology who used the L. Ron Hubbard ‘tech’ against us. If it hadn’t been Mike it would have been somebody else.”

Bunker was also glad to see Rinder say what he did. “During the course of getting Bob out of this, Mike and Bob did develop a friendship. We spoke about this quite a bit in the time before his death, that he really did create a friendship with Mike Rinder.”

 
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Bonus items from our tipsters

Would Scientology’s sneaky “human rights” front lure famed Olympic champion John Carlos, famous for his 1968 Black Power salute, to an event celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.?

Of course it would.

 
Actor Jason Dohring, son of ABCMouse.com baron Doug Dohring, helps out at the Celebrity Centre…

 
——————–

Start making your plans!

 
——————–

Scientology’s celebrities, ‘Ideal Orgs,’ and more!

We’ve been building landing pages about David Miscavige’s favorite playthings, including celebrities and ‘Ideal Orgs,’ and we’re hoping you’ll join in and help us gather as much information as we can about them. Head on over and help us with links and photos and comments.

Scientology’s celebrities, from A to Z! Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!

Scientology’s ‘Ideal Orgs,’ from one end of the planet to the other! Help us build up pages about each these worldwide locations!

Scientology’s sneaky front groups, spreading the good news about L. Ron Hubbard while pretending to benefit society!

Scientology Lit: Books reviewed or excerpted in our weekly series. How many have you read?

 
——————–

THE WHOLE TRACK

[ONE year ago] A mini-trove of early Scientology materials has some gems for us today
[TWO years ago] For 30 grand or so, Scientology will let you into its shrine to L. Ron Hubbard. Here’s a peek.
[THREE years ago] Scientology attorney Bert Deixler writes a threat letter to Karen de la Carriere over TV show
[FOUR years ago] Jon Atack: Scientology’s elusive ‘Clears’ and ‘Operating Thetans’ — where have they been?
[FIVE years ago] Leah Remini is still thumbing her nose at Scientology leader David Miscavige
[SIX years ago] Ursula Caberta Retiring: Her Thoughts On Fighting Scientology in Germany for 20 Years
[SEVEN years ago] Scientology Sues Debbie Cook Over Her New Year’s Eve E-Mail

 
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——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on January 31, 2019 at 07:00

E-mail tips to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We also post updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our new book with Paulette Cooper, Battlefield Scientology: Exposing L. Ron Hubbard’s dangerous ‘religion’ is now on sale at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. Our book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2018 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Underground Bunker (2012-2018), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Other links: BLOGGING DIANETICS: Reading Scientology’s founding text cover to cover | UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists | GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice | SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts | Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Watch our short videos that explain Scientology’s controversies in three minutes or less…

Check your whale level at our dedicated page for status updates, or join us at the Underground Bunker’s Facebook discussion group for more frivolity.

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news | Battling Babe-Hounds: Ross Jeffries v. R. Don Steele

 Chris Shelton and Sunny Pereira — two longtime former Sea Org members who really know the subject — today wrap up a series of discussions they’ve put together about Scientology and mental health.

“Scientology’s Introspection Rundown was L. Ron Hubbard’s supposed ‘cure’ for psychosis — his words,” Chris tells us. “This is a long and technical [...]]]>

 
Chris Shelton and Sunny Pereira — two longtime former Sea Org members who really know the subject — today wrap up a series of discussions they’ve put together about Scientology and mental health.

“Scientology’s Introspection Rundown was L. Ron Hubbard’s supposed ‘cure’ for psychosis — his words,” Chris tells us. “This is a long and technical video because we really get into the nitty-gritty details of some auditing methods and I think some folks will find this just as interesting as some of the finer points of the Introspection Rundown itself. I don’t think anyone has gone into such detail about this before, and it will give many never-ins a better look into what actually goes on in Scientology auditing. Sunny was invaluable in helping put this together and I want to acknowledge her for her great assistance with these videos.”

Says Sunny, “Not only do we cover the steps of the Introspection Rundown itself, but I end up talking about how Scientology enables compulsions, like the Dianetics quote about kissing 7-year-old girls. I also talk about what happened in Los Angeles when Lisa McPherson died at the Flag Land Base in Florida. Miscavige covered it up internally too, and not just at Flag,” she says. “I hope this talk helps somehow, for someone.”

 
——————–

Bonus items from our tipsters

That wave of new people didn’t materialize at Scientology orgs after the TV network went online on March 12, but never fear, Scientologists are being told that the big result is happening with online courses. Hip, hip, hooray!

 
Rasha was good enough to send us the new issue of Source magazine, which is setting new lows for propagandistic boredom. We did pull out a few things for your enjoyment, however.

 
——————–

Make your plans now!

HOWDYCON UPDATE

Wow, we’re now less than two months out, and Chee Chalker is working hard to make sure things are going to run smoothly at this year’s HowdyCon in Chicago, June 21-23. As in past years, we’re looking forward to meeting readers of the Bunker, culminating in Saturday night’s main event.

The biggest difference this year is that our Saturday night event is separate from that evening’s dinner. Chee is setting up an inexpensive pizza dinner that you don’t need to pay for ahead of time, after which we’ll walk over to the theater where our event, hosted by Chicago Fire star Christian Stolte, will take place. Because it’s a separate event, we’re asking that you pay $10 each to get into the Saturday night event, which will help us recoup what the Bunker paid for the venue. (We have never made a penny on our HowdyCon meetups, we only try to break even.)

Please email your proprietor (tonyo94 AT gmail) in order to reserve your spot for Saturday night’s main event. Seating is limited, and we’re going to have some really interesting people on stage and they may make a few announcements that you don’t want to miss.

 
——————–

——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on May 3, 2018 at 07:00

E-mail tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2017 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2017), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news

Way back in 1999, we wrote a story for the Phoenix New Times about a local resident who was getting the full “Fair Game” treatment from the Church of Scientology. Jeff Jacobsen was a knowledgeable church critic who had alerted the world to the plight of a [...]]]>

Way back in 1999, we wrote a story for the Phoenix New Times about a local resident who was getting the full “Fair Game” treatment from the Church of Scientology. Jeff Jacobsen was a knowledgeable church critic who had alerted the world to the plight of a parishioner named Lisa McPherson who had died on the other side of the country. Jeff was also known for an excellent backgrounder on L. Ron Hubbard’s “technology,” and for being one of the members of the Lisa McPherson Trust in Clearwater, Florida. He made a trip back to Clearwater this week, and we asked him to send us his thoughts about it…

I took a quick trip to Florida for the first time since 2001, when the Lisa McPherson Trust closed down. While I worked there Clearwater was trying hard to figure out how to revitalize their downtown. The main problem, however, was that Scientology also had big plans for the downtown area, and had by then already purchased millions of dollars in properties, and their staff were heading to and fro everywhere in their uniforms. The place truly did seem occupied by some huge corporation, or maybe cult.

Clearwater still hasn’t figured out how to revitalize downtown. I spent a couple of hours on my own last week just walking around to see what differences 17 years might have brought. It is a bit tidier now. There seem to be more stores open, although it is still far from revitalized. Little shops like the Lucky Anchor Bar have tables and chairs out in front of their respective locations. This is good because the city has ONE bench in all of downtown that I could see. They even took benches out of the Gaslight Alley Park, which essentially defeats the purpose of the park as a quiet place to relax. If the city wants to attract people downtown, why not give them shade trees and places to sit? I even asked this question at the downtown development office. The woman there said yes, that’s a good point. I’ll pass that on. Sure.

The mass marches to the back of the Clearwater Bank Building don’t happen anymore. This is where the cafeteria was for staff, so bus after bus and wave after wave of Scientologists in uniform would crowd in there in shifts. I think I heard they moved the cafeteria to the Super Power building now, but I didn’t see any mass migration there so don’t know. One new thing is a cross walk on Ft. Harrison Avenue right in front of the Ft. Harrison Hotel. It has a button for the pedestrians to push that sets off flashing yellow lights so traffic has to stop for them. I saw these flashing lights going often, and in fact I had to wait myself for a slow string of staff members continually pressing that button. This seems a little strange to me because just above the heads of all those pedestrians is a walkway going over Ft. Harrison Avenue connecting the hotel to the Super Power building. Is this used at all? I couldn’t see inside so don’t know.

Staff in crisp black and white uniforms are still rushing from place to place (do they actually have identical sunglasses?), only the foot traffic seems more spread out now. I saw people walking from the Sandcastle to the Ft. Harrison, and every place in between. After walking past Super Power, I even walked past Ben Shaw! I thought about talking to him, but then wondered if he knew who I was as we smiled at each other. So I just walked on, marveling that he looked pretty good for a 100-year-old.

 
The Lisa McPherson Trust building is now occupied by the Way to Happiness. And in fact that whole block is now Scientology front groups, with no foot traffic to any of them. At least the buildings are kept up and look occupied, making the downtown appear more active than otherwise.

While passing the old LMT I saw a book in the curb. I picked it up and saw it was a Russian-to-English dictionary. There is discussion about how many staff are at Flag on Religious Worker visas from other countries, so that fits in.

The Lisa McPherson brick in the Gaslight Alley Park is now the front middle brick as you step into the park. Someone had scratched out the name from the brick, so we paid for a replacement and the city moved that brick front and center so if anyone else tried to deface it they would be noticed. Thank you, Clearwater.

When I worked at the LMT, a routine set in where Scientology’s private investigators would follow us to and from work and to other destinations. Ever-present security at Scientology buildings would constantly watch us and report in on their radios. On this trip, however, there seemed to be less security than I was used to, but yet… as I was walking around like a simple tourist, taking photos here and there, a young guy in a nice suit, with a big walkie-talkie or something on his belt, seemed to be paying attention to me. But I was never followed that I could tell on foot or by car. After meeting with some friends at the Lucky Anchor, however, I walked to my car parked in the public parking garage across from the LMT. Standing near my car was a tall thin young man who started a conversation with me by asking me what I was doing there. He seemed upset that I had been denigrating someone with my life-size cutout of David Miscavige. My friends and I and some other people took photos with the cutout here and there. As I was debating whethere to actually have a conversation, I asked “who are you? Are you a Scientologist?” He said yes and I said “oh, then I don’t have to talk to you” and went to my car. He took the required photos of me and my car as I left.

So what’s new in Clearwater after 17 years? Unfortunately, not much. Small attempts are being made to make change, but that 400-pound gorilla is still there, and apparently still in control.

 
— Jeff Jacobsen

 
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LD Sledge posts his Flag graduation

LD Sledge is a longtime Scientologist we’ve noted from time to time. He is a die hard who joined the church in 1970s, a charismatic guy who offers his services as a ghostwriter. He went through a bout with cancer not too long ago, and we quietly rooted for him to come through it. And now he’s graduated on some Basics course — after already achieving the highest level on the Bridge to Total Freedom, OT 8, which is one of David Miscavige’s odd innovations. It’s like a PhD has redone the 4th grade and is being celebrated by what appear to be several hundred enthusiastic Scientologists at the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater.

Sledge posted this graduation video himself to Facebook, so we’re going to share it with you to get a glimpse of Flag today. So many people who started during LD’s time have fallen away. What keeps him in?

 
It’s interesting to hear him recount his Scientology origin story. Glancing at an article in a 1975 copy of Celebrity magazine gripped his mind late one night. What he had read was an excerpt from a Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture from 1952 which is fairly well known — it’s called “Boots in the Sky,” and here’s the transcript of it, with L. Ron Hubbard talking about how he had stepped into the biggest shoes in the universe.

Cast yourself back to 1975. Would reading this have utterly changed your life?

What is the essential difference between what I’m doing in Scientology and other people? Is it because I’m brighter? No, no. Uh-uh. Is it because I know more? Naw. No there’s really only one thing, is I recognize that it’s my job, I recognize anybody has this job. You see, anybody has this job. And there was this great big pair of boots and they were sitting right in the middle of this universe, and they were awfully big boots, and you could get down amongst them with telescopes. You could look the length and breadth of them and find absolutely nothing inhabiting ’em.

And it says in these boots, it just simply said, “These are the boots which go down a road which leads out of this joint.” And other people had been diving spaceships through them and playing hopscotch in them and so on, when they ever did see them, and so on. They were sitting right there. They sat on the doorstep of every door that has ever been covered with crepe. They sat on the doorstep of every bank that ever reneged on a pledged agreement or refused a loan to somebody who was desperate. They sat on the doorstep of every church which itself was pretending to take vast responsibility. They fell across every single boulevard and progress that Man ever thought he could make. He could go ahead and take responsibility for destroying culture, but not for helping a single individual in it. Ho!

Fascinating! Why, those boots – well, you look at these boots, and they weren’t even big boots. They were little boots – little kids’ boots. Wasn’t anything to them. And what’d you do? You just threw some space out that big, that’s all. I mean, you narrowed the space down to the universe of one man and you found out he was a highly representative man, and then you took a look. The boots were very wearable. And they’re very, very simply boots. But what do you know? These boots have a catch to them. They aren’t just one man’s boots. They were every man’s boots. And because I assayed to take a few steps in them and square them around and find out where the road was and what leather they were made out of, didn’t absolve a single individual who cared to benefit from those boots from wearing them. And that is the grimmest joke of all.

A person has to come up the scale so that he can take responsibility for himself and all of his fellows and the whole cock-eyed condemned universe before he can walk down that road out. Isn’t that fascinating?

 
——————–

HOWDYCON UPDATE

We’re just a little more than two months out, and Chee Chalker is working hard to make sure things are going to run smoothly at this year’s HowdyCon in Chicago, June 21-23. As in past years, we’re looking forward to meeting readers of the Bunker, culminating in Saturday night’s main event.

The biggest difference this year is that our Saturday night event is separate from that evening’s dinner. Chee is setting up an inexpensive pizza dinner that you don’t need to pay for ahead of time, after which we’ll walk over to the theater where our event, hosted by Chicago Fire star Christian Stolte, will take place.

Because it’s a separate event, we’re asking that you pay $10 each to get into the Saturday night event, which will help us recoup what the Bunker paid for the venue. (We have never made a penny on our HowdyCon meetups, we only try to break even.)

Please email your proprietor (tonyo94 AT gmail) in order to reserve your spot for Saturday night’s main event. Seating is limited, and we’re going to have some really interesting people on stage and they may make a few announcements that you don’t want to miss.

 
——————–

——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on April 13, 2018 at 07:00

E-mail tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2017 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2017), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news

 Whether it’s about the shocking way people have been treated at a remote Tennessee facility, or the infamous death of a woman in Florida, for years we’ve been writing about Scientology’s poor record of handling the needs of the mentally ill. Now, Chris Shelton and Sunny Pereira are beginning a series of discussions specifically about [...]]]>

 
Whether it’s about the shocking way people have been treated at a remote Tennessee facility, or the infamous death of a woman in Florida, for years we’ve been writing about Scientology’s poor record of handling the needs of the mentally ill. Now, Chris Shelton and Sunny Pereira are beginning a series of discussions specifically about Scientology’s ideas about mental health. We think you’re going to find it very interesting. Here’s what Chris has to say about today’s first installment…

About a year ago, you all might recall Tony’s story about Marc Vallieres and the charges brought against him and two other Scientologists for holding two people against their will in shacks on their Tennessee property. Those were Scientologists attempting to use L. Ron Hubbard’s methods to “cure” people who had real mental health issues.

L. Ron Hubbard claimed from the earliest days of Dianetics that he had methods that could treat and even cure the insane, and he wasn’t bashful in his boasts. This week, former Scientologist and highly trained Sea Org member Sunny Pereira and I talk in detail about Scientology’s “tech” on medicine and mental health treatments. Over the following episodes in this series, we’ll be taking apart the Introspection Rundown piece-by-piece. This is grim material but we do our best not to get too serious about all this, because the tragic consequences of this is all-too-obvious and all-too-painful for those who have had to live through it. With Scientology TV ramping up its anti-psychiatry rhetoric, I figured it was time to put some truth out there about Scientology’s so called “solutions.”

 
——————–

HOWDYCON UPDATE

We’re just a little more than two months out, and Chee Chalker is working hard to make sure things are going to run smoothly at this year’s HowdyCon in Chicago, June 21-23. As in past years, we’re looking forward to meeting readers of the Bunker, culminating in Saturday night’s main event.

The biggest difference this year is that our Saturday night event is separate from that evening’s dinner. Chee is setting up an inexpensive pizza dinner that you don’t need to pay for ahead of time, after which we’ll walk over to the theater where our event, hosted by Chicago Fire star Christian Stolte, will take place.

Because it’s a separate event, we’re asking that you pay $10 each to get into the Saturday night event, which will help us recoup what the Bunker paid for the venue. (We have never made a penny on our HowdyCon meetups, we only try to break even.)

Please email your proprietor (tonyo94 AT gmail) in order to reserve your spot for Saturday night’s main event. Seating is limited, and we’re going to have some really interesting people on stage and they may make a few announcements that you don’t want to miss.

 
——————–

——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on April 12, 2018 at 07:00

E-mail tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2017 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2017), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news

 We’re very glad to be done with our series about Lisa McPherson, who died 20 years ago yesterday. But after paying such close attention to Scientology’s grimmest of scandals, we thought we owed you a laugh today.

So, as a postscript to what you’ve just been through, we’re posting something we know some of you have [...]]]>

 
We’re very glad to be done with our series about Lisa McPherson, who died 20 years ago yesterday. But after paying such close attention to Scientology’s grimmest of scandals, we thought we owed you a laugh today.

So, as a postscript to what you’ve just been through, we’re posting something we know some of you have already seen, but is worth a look if you haven’t encountered it before. It’s David Miscavige, at the Maiden Voyage event in 2000, spinning the church’s victory after the criminal prosecution for Lisa’s death was dropped that year.

This is some vintage Miscavige, but even more so than usual because he’s spinning these conspiracy theories in a speech rather than filtered through a Freedom magazine investigation or a Golden Era video with a voiceover actor.

Someone has put some very entertaining titles on the videos, which were posted in 2008, when Chanology was new. We’re more interested in your observations, however, especially now that we’ve all had a chance to refresh our memories about what actually happened to Lisa McPherson…

 
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Bonus photos from our tipsters

Ivonne Armant has been reminiscing lately and posted this photo of her first visit to Flag. Ivonne is a Mexican actress who posed for Playboy, won ‘Big Brother VIP’ in Spain, and happens to be the daughter of Placido Domingo Jr., but they are estranged (we think). She writes: “Never in my life have I seen anything like it, nor have I known a study technology so superior to everything else, so futuristic and so incredible!”

 
Whale Jim Mathers with the next phenom, a kid from St. Petersburg…

 
Check out Denver, rolling out the big stats: “We have a game of the highest Survival Rundown hours every week and these were the winners.”

 
Even the clams can’t wait for December 18…

 
Here’s our first glimpse of Robin Hogarth in a while. Hey, Robin, how’s the Duggan kid?

 
Joy Villa helps promote yet another Scientology front group, this one founded in 2009 to promote “Purposeful Play.” Because L. Ron Hubbard’s athletic accomplishments have been cruelly overlooked. Or something.

 
Denice Duff posted this photograph of herself and Jason Dohring in a skit at the Celebrity Centre that benefited the LAPD’s Police Activities League. Nothing like getting even cozier with the local cops.

 
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BOOK NOTES

We didn’t get a chance to include photos in our book, so we’ve posted them at a dedicated page. Reader Sookie put together a complete index and we’re hosting it here on the website. Copies of the paperback version of ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely’ are on sale at Amazon. The Kindle edition is also available, and shipping instantly.

Our book tour is concluded for now. (But you can re-experience it through this nifty interactive map!) We’ll let you know about future appearances. Previous events: Santa Barbara (5/16), Hollywood (5/17), Orange County (5/17), San Diego (5/20), San Francisco (5/22), New York (6/11), Chicago (6/20), Toronto (6/22), Clearwater (6/28), Washington DC (7/12), Hartford (7/14), Denver (7/17), Dallas (7/20), Houston (7/22), San Antonio (7/24), Austin (7/25), Paris (7/29), London (8/4), Boston (8/24), Phoenix (9/15), Cleveland (9/23), Minneapolis (9/24), Portland (9/27), Seattle (9/28), Vancouver BC (9/29), Sydney (10/23), Melbourne (10/25), Adelaide (10/28), Perth (10/30)

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 6, 2015 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of LA attorney and former church member Vance Woodward

UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer
The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill
The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our Guide to Alex Gibney’s film ‘Going Clear,’ and our pages about its principal figures…
Jason Beghe | Tom DeVocht | Sara Goldberg | Paul Haggis | Mark “Marty” Rathbun | Mike Rinder | Spanky Taylor | Hana Whitfield

 What Laura Arrunada, Lisa McPherson’s final caretaker, saw in Room 174 of the Fort Harrison Hotel in the last three days of Lisa’s life was so upsetting, Marty Rathbun made her reports disappear.

Laura had trained to be a doctor in Mexico, and had completed her coursework and a two-year residency, but had stopped short of [...]]]>

 
What Laura Arrunada, Lisa McPherson’s final caretaker, saw in Room 174 of the Fort Harrison Hotel in the last three days of Lisa’s life was so upsetting, Marty Rathbun made her reports disappear.

Laura had trained to be a doctor in Mexico, and had completed her coursework and a two-year residency, but had stopped short of taking the board exam to become a physician. Ten years later, she was working in the Sea Org at Scientology’s Flag Land Base in its medical liaison office. She had first been asked to work a shift with Lisa McPherson on the day after Thanksgiving.

A week later, she was working with Rita Boykin and Heather Hoff while being overseen by Janis Johnson. Laura’s shifts started in the late afternoon and went until the early morning. And on Lisa’s final two nights, Laura witnessed a disturbing sight.

Sunday night, December 3, 1995, Laura watched as Lisa, who at this point could no longer stand or get around the hotel room on her own, was lying flat on the floor, face down. And her hips began to move.

Laura began to realize what was happening. Lisa was moving as if she was having sex with someone. She was kissing the floor and grinding her pelvis on it. Then, Lisa turned from the floor and began to masturbate.

Laura told police that Lisa repeated the act the next night, Lisa’s last alive. And while pushing and rubbing against the floor, Lisa had made two, symmetrical scrapes on the end of her nose.

It wasn’t the first time that one of the caretakers had recorded sexual behavior by Lisa. On the first day of her ‘babywatch,’ on November 19, Lisa had tried to provoke Susanne Schnurrenberger by kissing her, touching her breasts, and licking her face. Schnurrenberger didn’t react, and, following the protocol of Scientology procedure, remained silent around Lisa.

Now, more than two weeks later, Laura Arrunada said, under oath, that she’d seen an even more disturbing sight, with Lisa moving against the floor.

On the night of December 4 she also told Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer, that Lisa was looking bad and perhaps needed an IV to get fluids into her. It was a rare admission by one of the Scientologist caretakers that Lisa might actually need to see a real doctor.

Laura’s shift ended at about 6 in the morning on December 5, twenty years ago today.

Heather Hoff, just 17 years old, took over for the day, and she reported that Lisa stayed in bed and wasn’t talking or moving, a big contrast to just a few days earlier. Like Laura, Heather felt compelled to make sure that Lisa was still breathing.

At 5 pm, Laura returned for another shift, and Heather was in the bathroom with Lisa, running the shower while Lisa sat in the tub, looking limp.

Laura was immediately struck by how much worse Lisa looked than just twelve hours earlier. To Laura, with her medical training, Lisa looked septic — like she was suffering from an infection. And while Laura went to help Heather with the shower, Lisa’s diarrhea returned as her bowels emptied while she sat in the tub.

Laura was really alarmed now. She knew that Lisa’s anus relaxing like that could be a sign of real trouble. She told Heather she was going to notify Janis Johnson, the chief medical officer.

“I went to tell Janis that she was not looking good…You know, like she was a, like darkness around her eyes. And I mean, I know that when this anus is relaxed it is some neurological trouble,” Laura later told police.

Laura said that this happened a little after 5 p.m., when she first arrived for her shift. But Janis didn’t arrive at the room for almost two hours, at about 7 p.m. (Janis told police she arrived as soon as she could “break free.”)

Janis checked and found that Lisa didn’t seem to have a fever, but she did appear to be septic, like there was an infection in her blood. Also that she looked very dehydrated.

Janis took Laura aside — they were still trying not to talk in Lisa’s presence — and told her that she wanted to talk to a Scientologist doctor named David Minkoff, an infectious disease specialist at a hospital in Pasco County, about 45 minutes away.

Laura put Lisa into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt while Janis went to call Minkoff.

Two weeks earlier, Janis had met Minkoff for lunch, to talk about referring patients to his pain clinic, another reason Janis might have thought of Minkoff. (Neither Minkoff or Janis mentioned to police what David Houghton, the dentist, had said, that about a week earlier he had talked over with Minkoff the situation in Room 174, and the two of them decided to get some liquid Valium to have on hand to sedate Lisa. The Valium was never used. Minkoff, meanwhile, gave police the impression that the first time he’d heard about Lisa was when Janis called him on the evening of December 5.)

Janis told Minkoff that Lisa needed an antibiotic, but Minkoff told her he’d need to see a patient before prescribing one. She asked him about bringing Lisa to see him, and hoped to keep away from the “hoo-hah” of the emergency room. Minkoff was a Scientologist, and understood what she meant — they wouldn’t want people making noise or speaking to Lisa if they could help it. Minkoff told Janis to bring Lisa down to the hospital, and that he’d be working until 10 p.m.

Janis then put together the go team. She sent Laura to ask Paul Greenwood to join them, asked Emma Schamehorn to draw a map to the hospital in New Port Richey where Dr. Minkoff worked, and then went to get her Mazda minivan from across the street to pull it up to the curb at the cabanas on Osceola Avenue.

Greenwood was a retired chiropractor from Bellingham, Washington who was now a deputy staff section officer and had been doing some coursework when Laura asked him to come help.

When he arrived in Room 174, Lisa McPherson was lying on her bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling and breathing heavily, not saying anything, and not moving.

They could see that Janis was pulling her minivan up to the curb, so Paul lifted Lisa under her arms while Laura lifted her feet. They carried her out to the van and put her sitting up in the middle of the bench seat in the back.

Being careful not to say anything in Lisa’s presence, Laura got into the car so she was sitting next to Lisa on her left. She put her arm around Lisa, whose head rested on her shoulder. Paul got in next to Lisa on her right, and Janis, with the map Emma had drawn for her to the hospital in Pasco County, began driving.

Just five or six minutes away there was a much closer facility — Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater. But it was the one where Lisa had been taken after her car accident on November 18, and Janis would have worried that doctors there would try again to get a psychiatric evaluation. In fact, Janis passed four hospitals that were all closer than the one in New Port Richey, where Dr. Minkoff was waiting.

Asked later about taking such a long drive to get Lisa to a doctor, Laura defended Janis’s decision, saying that they really didn’t know she was so sick.

About halfway through the journey, both Paul and Janis each told police, Lisa’s breathing suddenly changed. They said Lisa started breathing more quickly, but then settled down and it “got very, very soft,” Paul later said.

He took her right wrist into his hand, searching for a pulse. He found it, but it was getting harder and harder to discern. He looked at Laura and signaled for her to look for a pulse as well, again trying to keep silent around Lisa in the Scientology custom.

With about five minutes left in the journey, Laura checked Lisa’s carotid artery and also expressed with a hand gesture that she too was having a hard time finding a pulse.

Neither of them called for Janis to stop the car so they could start lifesaving activities. They just drove on.

When Janis arrived at the emergency room entrance, she ran out to tell the front desk person that she needed help.

The first to the scene was a registered nurse, Theresa Klimaszewski. She went to the van and could see that Lisa was leaning on Laura. Theresa tried to find a pulse, but was unable to. But it was dark, and she assumed that Lisa was just unresponsive.

A moment later, triage nurse Rick Pemberton arrived with a wheelchair. (Janis had been told that the ER didn’t have a spare stretcher to take to the van.) Pemberton later told police that as soon as he reached Lisa and began to put her in the chair, he knew she was already dead. A few minutes later, Theresa was sure of it too. But if Lisa had died, she was pale but not cyanotic (she hadn’t turned blue), suggesting to them that she had just expired. Theresa assumed it had just happened, Rick guessed that it was up to an hour before — but he emphasized to police that he was not a forensic specialist.

Minkoff was told that his patient had arrived, and when he saw Lisa slumped on the wheelchair, he was struck by the appearance of her skin, which bore hemorrhages just under the skin, suggesting sepsis. He took her immediately into the trauma room, had her intubated, and started CPR. About a half hour later, they stopped their efforts.

Other workers at the hospital, who were not Scientologists, backed up Minkoff’s insistence that he had no idea, from Janis’s earlier call, that Lisa was in such bad shape. He was stunned when he first saw her, and let Janis know that he was angry.

Back in the lobby, Janis realized that Lisa McPherson had died when one of the hospital workers began asking her and Laura about how to spell Lisa’s name, and where she lived, and who was her next of kin.

They had forgotten to bring her purse, and neither Janis or Laura knew Lisa very well, despite what they’d been through in recent days. They didn’t know what to say.

 
It fell to Tom DeVocht to call Scientology leader David Miscavige in California and inform him of Lisa’s death. From an office at the West Coast Building in Clearwater, DeVocht called Miscavige. Janet Reitman, in her book Inside Scientology, points out that Marty Rathbun was also present in Clearwater, and he also kicked into action.

Mark “Marty” Rathbun had been the second-highest official in Scientology, David Miscavige’s right hand man and a formidable enforcer. He had worked his way back from a fall from grace — he’d “blown” (left) Scientology in 1993, and then had served a kind of banishment on the Freewinds until the summer of 1995. He had watched with concern as Miscavige had supervised Lisa’s auditing.

Miscavige had overseen Lisa McPherson’s auditing, had declared her “Clear,” and now she had died after what looked like a terribly botched attempt to keep her confined in a hotel room while she was going through a mental breakdown. What immediately worried them was any evidence that Lisa’s health had been in the hands of Janis Johnson, the disgraced Arizona doctor who had lost her license to practice medicine following an investigation there that she had stolen pain drugs from her patients.

Rathbun fired up an operation to have any evidence that Johnson had been practicing medicine on Lisa removed from the premises. (The hotel also had plenty of time to completely scrub Lisa’s cabana, and replaced her two double beds with a king-sized bed before police ever got a look at the room.) Rathbun also admitted, in 2009, that he’d had documents destroyed.

Each of the caretakers had been asked to write down statements, and to have filled out daily logs about their shifts. More than a year later, as a police investigation picked up steam, Rathbun looked through the caretaker logs. In a 2009 interview, Rathbun told the St. Petersburg Times about his decision to make some of that information from Lisa’s final days disappear…

Three entries particularly troubled Rathbun. One contained a bizarre sexual reference McPherson had made. Another revealed that no one thought to remove the mirror from the room of a psychotic woman bent on harming herself. The third was one caretaker’s opinion that the situation was out of control and that McPherson needed to see a doctor. Rathbun concluded the notes had to go.

Arrunada’s observation about Lisa’s disturbing sexual movements on the floor occurred on December 3 and 4 — the two days that Rathbun had destroyed. That was also the time when Arrunada suggested to Janis that Lisa needed an IV and real medical care.

Reading the existing caretaker statements, the caretaker logs, the sworn statements, the prosecution summaries, and lengthy police and prosecutor summaries, the material in them is, for the large part, very consistent. The few examples when that’s not the case stick out like a sore thumb.

Janis Johnson, for example, lies like a rug repeatedly in her interview with police to the point where it’s almost physically painful to read. The disgraced former physician repeatedly pushes Scientology’s shore story, that Lisa was at the Fort Harrison to get rest and relaxation, did not want to see a doctor, and only became very ill at the last minute.

This, for example, is how Janis described Lisa’s reaction on the evening of December 5 — several days after the other caretakers said Lisa could barely speak, couldn’t walk, and was completely incoherent…

“She was actually the friendliest she had ever been to me. She actually was happy to see me. She smiled at me, you know? She said ‘hi.’ It was like, whoa, this is different. Maybe she realized she did need some help and she was, you know, at last willing to accept some help.”

At last willing to accept some help. It may be the single most disgusting lie told in the entire investigation. That Lisa McPherson, after 17 days of forced feedings, being held in a room against her will, and being subjected to a cruel silent treatment finally would allow herself to be “helped.”

Another obvious lie: Janis claimed that she had to talk Lisa into the idea of going to see Dr. Minkoff. Janis describes having a conversation with Lisa and overcoming her objections to seeing a doctor by explaining that he was a Scientologist.

Remember, this supposed conversation happens a couple of hours after Lisa was so far gone, she had sat limply in her bathtub and shit herself as Heather Hoff and Laura Arrunada had been bathing her.

But another reason that Janis’s story that she overcame Lisa’s objections is an obvious shore story is that just minutes later in her interview with police, she’s talking about how she and Laura moved out of Lisa’s earshot to discuss how they were going to get her to the New Port Richey Hospital. Oh, that’s right, neither of them were having any kind of conversations with Lisa because none of them had said a word to her in more than two weeks as part of Scientology’s sadistic Introspection Rundown.

And about that, this was Janis Johnson’s response when police asked her about the Introspection Rundown: “I don’t know of any such course…She was simply there to rest.”

Reading Janis Johnson’s lies, you can begin to see why, as Janet Reitman explains in her book, Clearwater Police and state investigators asked the state prosecutor to indict Janis for manslaughter. They also wanted Janis and Laura indicted for practicing medicine without a license, and Laura and Alain Kartuzinski indicted for manslaughter. Instead, the prosecutor chose lesser charges, and against the church rather than individuals. It was a weak choice, Reitman explains, and then later fell apart anyway.

As Reitman explains, Dr. Joan Wood, the Pinellas-Pasco County medical examiner, had made a crucial mistake. She found that Lisa had died from a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in the lungs — that was brought on by bed rest and extreme dehydration. But she also said that Lisa had to have been unconscious for 24 to 48 hours before she died, which didn’t comport with what the caretakers and security guards and Paul Greenwood and others had said in reports and interviews. Scientology, Marty Rathbun has revealed, spent millions trying to destroy Joan Wood and her conclusions. But as Reitman explains, it was the absence of a substance in Lisa’s body — known as ketone proteins — that proved Wood had been wrong about Lisa being unconscious for two days, and lent credence to what the caretakers had said, that Lisa was becoming unresponsive, but was at least conscious and still receiving some small amounts of nutrition up to her last day. After a retest showed again the lack of ketones, “Wood was cornered, and she knew it,” Reitman writes. Forced to change her report, Scientology pounced, and prosecutors knew that they’d be unable to call Wood as a witness. Their case crumbled, and the criminal prosecution was ended in 2000. Wood still maintained that Lisa had died from the pulmonary embolism, but now she removed reference to bed rest and dehydration, and called the death accidental.

But regardless of Wood’s mistakes or the crushing legal onslaught Scientology subjected her to, other experts backed up her assessment that Lisa’s case of dehydration was practically off the charts. Tom Tobin of the St. Petersburg Times submitted the findings of Lisa’s autopsy to five independent doctors who were tops in their field, and they all agreed that Lisa had been extremely dehydrated, and that it had happened over a considerable time. And again, that matched the large amount of material in the caretaker statements, caretaker logs, and police interviews. For more than two weeks, the Scientologist Sea Org workers had gotten Lisa to ingest an inadequate amount of food and water, and gave her things like Cal-Mag which only exacerbated the problem.

Once again, the caretaker information (except for the obvious lies in an interview like Janis Johnson’s) was consistent and rang true. And that’s why another of Wood’s conclusions simply doesn’t work with what we know about how Lisa was handled in Room 174. Wood concluded from the appearance of Lisa’s skin on her arms and legs and nose that she had been bitten by cockroaches. Other experts disagreed, saying her skin was consistent with her ailments. But insect bites also simply didn’t comport with multiple caretakers watching Lisa 24 hours a day in a hotel room. Like Wood’s assumption about Lisa being unconscious, it just didn’t work unless there had been a massive conspiracy by Lisa’s caretakers and security guards and others to lie in statements given up to two years apart. And, like the mistake about Lisa being unconscious for two days, it just doesn’t work.

But it was a salacious detail, and one that shocked the public and tended to reinforce the beliefs of people who wanted to see Scientology as an evil force that would kill one of its own parishioners. So the cockroach bite detail overwhelmed everything else. The public got the perception that Lisa had been held in a dungeon somewhere with insects feeding on her in a swarm.

It just wasn’t the case. The truth was bad enough. Scientologists, robotically following the dictates of a man who had been dead for almost a decade, L. Ron Hubbard, had dealt with Lisa’s madness by forcing herbal supplements and inappropriate liquids into her by holding her down and using a syringe, by confining her to a hotel room day after day, and expecting that she’d “calm down” and become ready for auditing. She did calm down. She became limp. She was dehydrated and had lost weight to the point that she was skeletal. She could no longer stand and had become incontinent. And they watched. They watched as she died in front of them.

That was bad enough. And because of the church’s millions, and because even the state of Florida was so intimidated by Scientology, the people responsible were never charged and never faced justice.

On this December 5, twenty years after her death, we apologize to Lisa McPherson that she never got the care or the justice she deserved. She was owed better.

Our series on the twentieth anniversary of Lisa McPherson’s death.

Nov. 12: Countdown to Room 174: Remembering, in real time, Scientology’s grimmest scandal
Nov. 13: Why it was Scientology leader David Miscavige who declared Lisa McPherson ‘Clear’
Nov. 15: Tom DeVocht: Watching David Miscavige watch Lisa McPherson and her faulty ‘needle’
Nov. 16: Lisa McPherson in Orlando: What her hotel roommate witnessed, and the Slaughter rule
Nov. 17: Our Scientology tech experts review Lisa McPherson’s grim cycle of guilt and self-blame
Nov. 18: Lisa McPherson’s last opportunity for standard care ended 20 years ago today
Nov. 19: ‘Babywatch,’ day one: Lisa McPherson raves out by Scientology’s holiest swimming pool
Nov. 20: Day two
Nov. 21: Day three
Nov. 22: Day four
Nov. 23: Day five
Nov. 24: Day six
Nov. 25: Lisa McPherson and the doctors: Hamstrung by the ‘spiritual’ needs of a thetan
Nov. 26: Day eight
Nov. 27: Day nine
Nov. 28: Day ten
Nov. 29: Day eleven
Nov. 30: Day twelve
Dec. 1: Day thirteen
Dec. 2: Day fourteen
Dec. 3: Day fifteen
Dec. 4: How Scientology ‘caretakers’ could stand by and watch Lisa McPherson deteriorate

 
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BOOK NOTES

We didn’t get a chance to include photos in our book, so we’ve posted them at a dedicated page. Reader Sookie put together a complete index and we’re hosting it here on the website. Copies of the paperback version of ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely’ are on sale at Amazon. The Kindle edition is also available, and shipping instantly.

Our book tour is concluded for now. (But you can re-experience it through this nifty interactive map!) We’ll let you know about future appearances. Previous events: Santa Barbara (5/16), Hollywood (5/17), Orange County (5/17), San Diego (5/20), San Francisco (5/22), New York (6/11), Chicago (6/20), Toronto (6/22), Clearwater (6/28), Washington DC (7/12), Hartford (7/14), Denver (7/17), Dallas (7/20), Houston (7/22), San Antonio (7/24), Austin (7/25), Paris (7/29), London (8/4), Boston (8/24), Phoenix (9/15), Cleveland (9/23), Minneapolis (9/24), Portland (9/27), Seattle (9/28), Vancouver BC (9/29), Sydney (10/23), Melbourne (10/25), Adelaide (10/28), Perth (10/30)

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 5, 2015 at 07:30

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of LA attorney and former church member Vance Woodward

UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer
The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill
The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our Guide to Alex Gibney’s film ‘Going Clear,’ and our pages about its principal figures…
Jason Beghe | Tom DeVocht | Sara Goldberg | Paul Haggis | Mark “Marty” Rathbun | Mike Rinder | Spanky Taylor | Hana Whitfield

 Inside the room there was hardly anything other than a bed and the person being given the silent treatment. Outside the room, there was someone watching to make sure that the door stayed closed and the person inside didn’t get out.

It was Scientology’s first “Introspection Rundown,” and it happened more than 40 years ago on [...]]]>

 
Inside the room there was hardly anything other than a bed and the person being given the silent treatment. Outside the room, there was someone watching to make sure that the door stayed closed and the person inside didn’t get out.

It was Scientology’s first “Introspection Rundown,” and it happened more than 40 years ago on a ship sailing the Atlantic that was called the Apollo. The person inside the cabin was a member of the crew named Bruce Welch, who had temporarily lost his mind.

The person sitting outside, providing security, was a young Australian Scientologist named Mike Rinder.

“It was my first job on the Apollo. To sit outside the cabin with Bruce Welch. And I can tell you, no one interacted with him at all,” Rinder told us recently.

The former Scientology spokesman, who left the church in 2007, remembers that Welch had not only had a psychotic break, but that he was a large man and an intimidating one.

“I was terrified of that guy. He was huge, and violent,” Rinder said.

The “Commodore” of the Apollo, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, decided that the best thing to do with Welch was to put him in a small cabin and deprive him of interaction. Whenever anyone came in contact with him, they should not speak. Without anything to upset him, Hubbard figured, then Welch would calm down to the point where he could be audited — Scientology’s version of counseling.

Rinder says Welch eventually did calm down. But not before destroying the cabin.

“He tore up the mattress and threw it out the porthole. He ripped up the locker and the bed. They all went out the porthole too. There was nothing left in the room at all. But there was also nothing to hurt himself with either,” he noted.

After Welch became calm, he got some auditing and it seemed to help.

Hubbard then announced, with typical bravado, that he’d discovered the sure-fire way to handle any psychosis, and he had also eliminated the reason for the psychiatric profession to exist. From then on, if a Scientologist went “Type III” — had a mental breakdown — they would be handled with the Introspection Rundown.

Whether there was ever any validity to Hubbard’s theory or not, Rinder told us, it was clear that Lisa McPherson, in late 1995, was never properly subjected to the conditions of an Introspection Rundown as it was known.

Rinder pointed out that Janis Johnson, the senior medical officer at the Flag Land Base, was usually in the cabana room at the Fort Harrison Hotel where Lisa was being held, as well as two caretakers — a total of three people, much of the time. Even though they didn’t speak to Lisa, their mere presence provided constant stimuli. “She was also in a room that had mirrors. And one wall was glass. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. The theory, whether you agree with it or not, is that you reduce the stimuli and the person eventually calms down. They’re supposed to be in something that’s like a padded cell, with no one to talk to,” Rinder explained. “As soon as you have someone there to have a reaction with, you’re not doing the Introspection Rundown.”

And Rinder is quick to point out that he’s not saying a proper Introspection Rundown would have helped Lisa, but only that she never got one. “It wasn’t even something that resembled an Introspection Rundown,” he said.

Instead, Lisa remained agitated and violent, day after day. And each day, the people overseeing her kept waiting for her to calm down as they literally watched her deteriorate from lack of food and water.

“I think they were trying to get her calm enough to be able to audit her. And they were hoping, each time, that the next day she would be calm enough so they could audit her. And none of the people who were there had a clue what they were doing,” Rinder said. (Rinder himself was at Int Base in California and was unaware of Lisa McPherson’s situation while this was going on.)

Janis Johnson oversaw the women who worked as caretakers — some of them had a little nursing or medical experience, but most did not. But running things was Flag senior case supervisor Alain Kartuzinski. We’ve written before about how Kartuzinski, a Scientology counselor with no medical background, overruled the three actual medical doctors who were either on hand or a short distance away and knew about Lisa’s situation. In interviews with police, one of the professionals — a soon-to-be licensed dentist named David Houghton — admitted that they deferred to Kartuzinski because he was in charge of Lisa’s “spiritual” needs.

(Kartuzinski himself, in an interview with police, didn’t bring up the Introspection Rundown, and when police did, asking Kartuzinski if Lisa had “asked” to be put on the rundown, he said, “No. Lisa, she wanted to rest.”)

We wrote at the beginning of this series about how involved Scientology leader David Miscavige was with Lisa McPherson’s auditing as he declared her “Clear” in early September. This was after she had gone through an Introspection Rundown in late June and July because she had experienced a mental breakdown and had admitted to having suicidal thoughts. Despite that happening only a few weeks before, Miscavige pushed Lisa through Clear while he was at the Flag base.

Since then, Miscavige had returned to Int Base in California. But was he aware of what was happening with Lisa McPherson at the Fort Harrison Hotel?

“He was getting reports from RTC people,” Rinder said.

The Religious Technology Center (RTC) is the nominally controlling entity of Scientology (we say “nominally” because it’s actually the Sea Organization, which has no legal status, that actually controls the entire Scientology movement, with Miscavige its only true “captain” in charge). Sea Org workers consider it a special status to work in RTC directly with Miscavige. And he also had RTC representatives in other locations. At Flag, it was Angie Trent and Rikke Jensen who reported to Miscavige as RTC reps, Rinder said.

Alain Kartuzinski may have played dumb with police, but in 1995 he would have been very aware of Lisa McPherson’s history and David Miscavige’s role in it. In the summer, Lisa had successfully completed an Introspection Rundown, but since then she had been “case supervised” by David Miscavige himself, who had declared her Clear after he had berated Kartuzinski for not handling her case correctly up to that point. Now, just a few months later, Lisa was a raving lunatic and Kartuzinski would have been under immense pressure. Miscavige’s pet project, Lisa McPherson, was invalidating Miscavige as a technical expert by losing her grip on reality so soon after he’d declared her Clear. Kartuzinski would have been hard pressed to “make things go right” and get Lisa calmed down and into auditing or he would face the wrath of Miscavige.

“To report to Miscavige that his C/Sing and programming had resulted in a psychotic break would have been suicide for [the RTC reps],” former top Scientology official Mark “Marty” Rathbun noted on his blog in 2012.

So between the terrified Scientology executives and the non-speaking caretakers, Lisa McPherson continued to get the same non-treatment, day after day.

And on Monday, December 4, 1995, Lisa McPherson was fading fast.

Janis Johnson said she peeked in at 8 p.m. that night and Lisa was in bed so she left.

Rita Boykin noticed that Lisa had a swollen jaw on the left side of her face, and when Rita tried to feed her, Lisa complained of pain in her throat.

Heather Hoff, meanwhile, could see now that Lisa had bruises on her legs, and feet, and her arms, and Heather assumed it was from all the times Lisa had been violent.

But now, Lisa was hardly moving, and when Heather tried to get her to eat something, she took in a little or just spit it out.

It had been sixteen days since Lisa had been brought to the Fort Harrison Hotel, and sixteen days of being fed protein shakes and herbal supplements and very little real food and water. And after sixteen days, Lisa McPherson was dying in front of her caretakers’ eyes.

 
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BOOK NOTES

We didn’t get a chance to include photos in our book, so we’ve posted them at a dedicated page. Reader Sookie put together a complete index and we’re hosting it here on the website. Copies of the paperback version of ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely’ are on sale at Amazon. The Kindle edition is also available, and shipping instantly.

Our book tour is concluded for now. (But you can re-experience it through this nifty interactive map!) We’ll let you know about future appearances. Previous events: Santa Barbara (5/16), Hollywood (5/17), Orange County (5/17), San Diego (5/20), San Francisco (5/22), New York (6/11), Chicago (6/20), Toronto (6/22), Clearwater (6/28), Washington DC (7/12), Hartford (7/14), Denver (7/17), Dallas (7/20), Houston (7/22), San Antonio (7/24), Austin (7/25), Paris (7/29), London (8/4), Boston (8/24), Phoenix (9/15), Cleveland (9/23), Minneapolis (9/24), Portland (9/27), Seattle (9/28), Vancouver BC (9/29), Sydney (10/23), Melbourne (10/25), Adelaide (10/28), Perth (10/30)

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 4, 2015 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of LA attorney and former church member Vance Woodward

UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer
The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill
The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our Guide to Alex Gibney’s film ‘Going Clear,’ and our pages about its principal figures…
Jason Beghe | Tom DeVocht | Sara Goldberg | Paul Haggis | Mark “Marty” Rathbun | Mike Rinder | Spanky Taylor | Hana Whitfield