It’s time for another look at the fundraising fliers and other come-ons that Scientologists received this week. On Sundays, we like to post the items that our tipsters have forwarded to us, so we can get a snapshot of what church members are getting hit up for at the moment.
This week, there are so many fun things to spend money on. A table at a CCHR awards banquet? A campaign of terror against psychiatry? Or more books for libraries around the world? Get that checkbook out and let’s start saving the world!
On January 14, Kima Douglas died in Scottsdale, Arizona after fighting a battle with pancreatic necrosis. She was 70 years old.
Nothing was reported in the local media about her passing. And except for some Facebook testaments written by friends and family, there has been little notice online that she is gone.
But Kima Douglas was well known in the world of Scientology, and spent several years caring for L. Ron Hubbard as his nurse during some of the most difficult years that he ran the organization while on the run himself.
Kima left Scientology in 1980 and then gave a rather legendary interview to Hubbard’s biographer, Russell Miller, in 1986. But after that she kept a low profile, and is remembered by friends for her kindness and caring.
In a delicious new story by Tony Dokoupil at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, a trove of new L. Ron Hubbard documents was found where no one thought to look before — at The Explorers Club here in New York City.
As Dokoupil points out, “the club was more than Hubbard’s watering hole. It was his permanent home, and — in a messy life of multiple homes, marriages, and children — his most stable family.” And to this day the club has a file of letters, journals, and some artifacts that record Hubbard’s association with it.
Dokoupil digs into the dispatches that Hubbard faithfully sent to the club, and checks them against the facts presented in Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (which mirrors the work done by numerous previous authors) and against the version of Hubbard’s life that the Church of Scientology puts out.
Once again, it’s no contest: the church’s story just doesn’t stack up against the biographies written by journalists. L. Ron Hubbard is, it turns out, a blowhard of epic proportions.
Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, Bay Area lawyer, blogger, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.
This week we have a short chapter in which Hubbard defines the four dynamics. Yes, four. Later, he will expand them to eight, but for now, we have four dynamics for survival — the self, sex, the group, and all mankind.
Earlier, Hubbard had introduced the idea that the purpose of life is to survive, and that we have more pleasure in our lives the closer we are to immortality, and more pain the closer we are to death. He defined something that tended to keep us from immortality as a “suppressor.” (And it’s important to remember that word for later.)
For now, Hubbard expands the idea of survival, saying that we are trying to survive in different realms, not only as individuals, but we’re also trying to leave behind children to carry on our names, and we also want the entire race to persevere.
Note: We’re posting the same item we published a year ago as an annual tribute to an amazing event. Hip, hip, hooray.
Twenty-seven years ago today, L. Ron Hubbard decided to leave his body after using it for 74 years.
A young David Miscavige, a Sea Org member who behind the scenes had been clearing the way to become Hubbard’s successor as leader of the Scientology movement, announced Hubbard’s death to his followers at the Palladium in Los Angeles. It is still a dramatic moment.
“Approximately two weeks ago, he completed all of his researches he had set out to do,” Miscavige says, and you can hear the audience react with admiration and applause, apparently not realizing what’s coming.
Last night, like many of you, we watched Lawrence Wright’s appearance on Anderson Cooper 360, which not only featured a rapid-fire interview of Wright by the CNN host, but also some looks back at Cooper’s 2010 show on Scientology. That four-part series explored accusations about church leader David Miscavige and violence that were first revealed in the St. Petersburg Times. In other words, the nostalgia value was high.
But if Wright was in rare form on CNN, he was even better in person. Also last night, Wright and his New Yorker editor Daniel Zalewski put on a great show at 92YTribeca in front of about 100 folks who had come in from the bitter cold.
And the words that Wright used to finish that show are still ringing in our ears. Scientology, he said, is heading for a reckoning.
In what appears to be the most serious legal challenge to Scientology in several years, former high-level Scientologists Luis Garcia and his wife Rocio of Irvine, California today filed a federal lawsuit against the Church of Scientology, alleging fraud over the way their contributions to the church — more than $400,000 — were misspent. The suit was filed in Florida’s Middle District with the help of the prestigious law firm Babbitt Johnson Osborne & Le Clainche, which says it plans to file additional lawsuits by other former church members.
UPDATE: See attorney Scott Pilutik’s thoughts on the lawsuit, below.
In 1993, the Internal Revenue Service granted Scientology tax exempt status, but the church was still beholden to an earlier Supreme Court decision that required it, as in a business, to give members refunds when they requested them.
Now that Scientology is in the grips of crisis and more and more longtime members like the Garcias are walking away from the church, an increasing number of them have asked for refunds — and the church isn’t giving them.
We’ve written about this state of affairs numerous times. Now, the Garcias have filed a lawsuit that accuses church leader David Miscavige of turning Scientology into little more than a fraudulent money-making scam.
“The Church, under the leadership of David Miscavige, has strayed from its founding principles and morphed into a secular enterprise whose primary purpose is taking people’s money,” the complaint says.
This report from CNN today gives you an indication of how the Church of Scientology is fighting back at Larry Wright’s book, Going Clear. It’s really quite entertaining. And should be even more so when, we hear, Wright appears on Anderson Cooper 360 tonight. Let’s all tune in! (Go here if you can’t get enough of the hilariously huffy lawyer letters that Scientology has sent CNN.)
Also, we hear that a major new Scientology story is going to break tomorrow, but we can’t say anything about it yet. We’re full of secrets today.
So we’ll take this brief lull to catch up on some of the items that have reached the bunker while we’ve been dealing with so many recent emergencies.
We are happy to report that love springs eternal for Tom Cruise’s daughter Isabella, who has been reunited with her boyfriend Eddie Frencher.
In August, we broke the news that Eddie had joined Scientology’s elite clerical order, the “Sea Organization,” which requires its members to sign billion-year contracts. Apparently, that turned out to be a billion years too many for Frencher, and both lovebirds appear very happy about it.
On Sundays, we bring to you the latest fliers and mailers and e-mails that Scientologists have received as the church encourages them to donate to one campaign after another. It’s dizzying to keep up with all the requests for cash that church members get hit up for, and this week we received a lot of interesting things to choose from. We call our weekly feature Sunday Funnies. So let’s dig in!
UPDATE 8:05 PM — The “Knowledge” Ad just ran during the AFC game, as promised. See our update below.
Our tipsters really came through this week. We were just sent this first flier, which claims that not only will Scientology’s “Knowledge” ad run during tonight’s AFC Championship game, but it also says that the church has bought an ad for Super Bowl XLVII on February 3!
That’s big news, and church members are being hit up for donations to help finance the ad. But is it really happening?
It’s time for another look at the fundraising fliers and other come-ons that Scientologists received this week. On Sundays, we like to post the items that our tipsters have forwarded to us, so we can get a snapshot of what church members are getting hit up for at the moment.
![[Adrian Gaut for Newsweek]](https://tonyortega.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/LRH_Explorers-300x199.jpg)
