Former Scientology Enforcer Marty Rathbun Examines His Past as the Church’s “Warrior”

Full warrior mode, circa 1990

Last week, Mark “Marty” Rathbun sent us a review copy of his newest book, Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior. We’re grateful that he did. After all, we weren’t gentle with our review of his first book, a sort of manifesto for the Independent Scientology community that he’s such a big part of.

Rathbun was once the second-highest ranking official in the Church of Scientology and oversaw its bruising legal strategies for many years. He had a reputation for being the “enforcer” for a church not known for turning the other cheek.

But after his defection in 2004 and then resurfacing in 2009, Rathbun quickly became, in our estimation, the single greatest threat to the ongoing existence of the church.

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Garcias Answer Scientology’s Attempt to Disqualify Their Attorneys in Fraud Lawsuit

Ronald Weil

Two weeks ago, the Church of Scientology pulled a classic maneuver from its bag of litigation tricks. Using the declaration of ex-church member Brian Culkin — who had signed the document reportedly in order to obtain a large refund — Scientology attempted to get the attorneys for Luis and Rocio Garcia disqualified in their federal fraud lawsuit against the church.

Tonight, the Garcias answered back with a coldly logical and narrowly focused briefing, which we’ve posted below.

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Scientology Gets Emotional: Claire Headley on the Tone Scale

Claire Headley is taking us on our journey to train as Scientologists. She and her husband Marc were Sea Org workers who escaped from Scientology’s International Base in 2005. She spent years working with Scientology’s “tech,” and was trusted to oversee the auditing of Tom Cruise. Go here to see the first part in this series.

For the past two weeks, Claire Headley has been helping us explore one of the most important steps that a Scientologist encounters early in his or her career: the PTS/SP course. Last week, we talked about the policy of “disconnection,” which has a tendency to rip apart families. This week, we’ve asked her to focus on another aspect of the course before moving on — we wanted her to talk to us about L. Ron Hubbard’s “Tone Scale.”

As early as his 1950 book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Hubbard was comparing life to a trip up and down a sort of keyboard of emotions. Later, that notion took firm hold in what he called his Tone Scale — a numerical value for determining a person’s emotional state.

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Scientology’s Drug Rehab Network Goes On the Offensive

If you’ve been following our coverage of Scientology even tangentially, you know that one of the big stories to emerge in the last year is the surprising meltdown occurring in the church’s drug rehab network, Narconon.

Four deaths since 2009 at Narconon Arrowhead, its flagship facility in Oklahoma, has resulted in multiple investigations and lawsuits. A devastating wrongful death lawsuit at its Georgia facility has produced criminal investigations of insurance and credit card fraud. And additional lawsuits and document leaks have revealed deceitful practices at centers in California, Michigan, and Florida.

Narconon’s controversies have garnered a lot of problematic publicity for Scientology, including a series of damaging segments at NBC’s Rock Center.

But now, Narconon is fighting back. With the powerful words of stand-up comic Clark Carr.

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Sunday Funnies: Scientology Has Your Back!

On Sundays, we love to turn over things to our worldwide network of tipsters, who send us the latest wacky mailers and fliers from the Church of Scientology.

This week, we have a fun variety of things, with an emphasis on getting your kids involved in some summertime fun that comes with a side helping of indoctrination!

Also, we raise a question about our friends across the pond. So let’s dive in.

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TMZ The Latest To Mix Up Tiziano Lugli for Tom Cruise

Oh brother, here we go again…

This isn’t the first time that ex-Scientologist Tiziano Lugli has been mistaken for Tom Cruise zipping around Hollywood on his Ducati motorcycle.

But TMZ? You’d think Harvey Levin’s outfit would want a bit more confirmation before deciding that a video of Tiziano and his wife Jamie is Tom Cruise and his “Rebound Chick.”

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Jon Atack on Scientology — “The Church of Hate”

Jon Atack is the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, one of the very best books on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. He now has a new edition of the book out, and on Saturdays he’s helping us sift through the legends, myths, and contested facts about Scientology that tend to get hashed and rehashed in books, articles, and especially on the Internet.

We’re taking a slight departure from our usual Saturday conversation with Jon. He’s headed for Denmark this week for a meeting of FECRIS, the Fédération Européenne des Centres de Recherche et d‘Information sur le Sectarisme, which in English becomes the European Federation of Centers of Research and Information on Sectarianism.

For the convention, Jon has written a brief overview of Scientology that we found powerful. If you’ve been keeping up with our Saturday conversations, you’ve seen us dive into quite a few different subjects in church history. But in this piece, Jon does his best to distill into one relatively short document what sets Scientology apart.

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A Sheriff’s Kind Words About Scientology’s Drug Rehab Has Victims’ Attorney Riled

We talked this afternoon with Gary Richardson, the former federal prosecutor who has filed more than ten lawsuits against Scientology’s flagship drug rehab facility in Oklahoma, Narconon Arrowhead.

Three of those lawsuits are in response to the deaths of Gabriel Graves, Hillary Holten, and Stacy Dawn Murphy, three Narconon patients who died in a nine-month period last year. Those deaths not only generated the lawsuits but also a new law recently passed which increases state oversight of the facility. But almost a year after the July 2012 death of Stacy Murphy, we still haven’t heard anything about the criminal investigations by Pittsburg County Sheriff Joel Kerns (pictured) and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

Kerns forwarded the results of his investigation to Pittsburg County District Attorney Farley Ward as long ago as October. And last month, on Tulsa television station Fox23, Kerns praised the drug rehab center.

Richardson says he found those statements outrageous, but he’s waited until this week to speak publicly about it.

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Scientology’s Enforcer Has a New Book: Will This Be The One We’re Waiting For?

Marty Rathbun’s latest book comes out this time next week, and we’ve got a review copy that we’ll be writing about next Wednesday.

Rathbun was once the second-highest ranking official in Scientology before his defection in 2004. He then disappeared so thoroughly, many people assumed he had died. But then he not only resurfaced, he started a blog in 2009 that quickly became Scientology leader David Miscavige’s biggest headache.

Rahbun’s blog has changed substantially in recent months, but he’s been focusing more on writing books about Scientology. We were fairly harsh with our reading of the first, found a lot more to like about the second, and we’ll give the latest one a thorough read before we give you our thoughts.

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A Womb With a View: More Dianetics Just-So Stories

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, we’ve reached a short chapter titled “Some Types of Engrams,” and it provides several examples of engrams, which we always find rather entertaining.

Our old friend Jeff Jacobsen has criticized us for not doing more in this series to explain that L. Ron Hubbard inherited many of his ideas from previous writers. And there’s no doubt, for example, that the basic notion of your adult life being affected by what happened while you were in your mother’s womb was something that had been suggested many years before Hubbard wrote Dianetics in 1950. If you haven’t seen it, you really should look at Jeff’s 1992 essay, “The Hubbard is Bare,” that lays out some of the predecessors to this book.

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