The Church Militant

As its title indicates, Ron Miscavige’s book is the latest addition to an impressive body of published literature—most of it by former church members but some of it by well-respected journalists (Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief is the best-known example of the latter)—that paints David Miscavige as a vengeful, secretive, and near-paranoid control freak given to terrifying bouts of rage and rule by intimidation, relentless belittling of subordinates, and punishments that include sleep deprivation, public humiliation, virtual imprisonment on Scientology premises, and “disconnection,” a form of shunning in which Scientologist relatives and friends cut off relations with apostates.

Ron Miscavige was one of those apostates, leaving Scientology in 2012 after he had finally had enough. Another was Jenna Miscavige Hill, David Miscavige’s niece and Ron Miscavige’s granddaughter. Hill quit Scientology in 2005 (her father, another Ron, had preceded her in 2000) and three years ago she published a book of her own, Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape.

It was the elder Ron Miscavige who brought his entire family into Scientology, around 1970. Born into a Polish family in northeastern Pennsylvania coal country, he married a fiery Italian hometown girl and high school classmate, Loretta Gidaro, after a stint in the Marines. Miscavige supported the family—four children, including David’s twin sister Denise and a younger daughter Lori—on his earnings as a cookware salesman, a job that, by his own account, he performed very well. The marriage was not a happy one: He and Loretta fought constantly, bitterly, sometimes physically, and usually in front of the children, although they stuck together for a surprisingly long time, not divorcing until the late 1980s (Loretta died in 2005).

David Miscavige was born, along with Denise, in 1960. Ron Miscavige describes the young David as “an affectionate, happy, bright kid with a great sense of humor and a desire to help others”—but in fact, as his father describes it, David started exhibiting at an early age some of the unpleasant traits that came to characterize his leadership style as head of Scientology: relentlessly bullying other kids to their faces and denigrating them behind their backs.

During the late 1960s, a salesman buddy introduced the elder Miscavige to Scientology, then a new and flourishing but still relatively obscure religion. Miscavige started attending impromptu Scientology “training” sessions, which his salesman pal had billed as a mind-over-matter course of “practical things you could do to help yourself.” Miscavige became a believer after he cured a headache by transferring it to an image of himself in a mirror. In 1969 he brought David, then age 9, to one of the sessions, where David was cured of the asthma that had plagued him since infancy and which his father was certain had a psychosomatic component. (Well, sort of cured: David continued to suffer minor attacks and was hospitalized at least once for a major episode as an adult.)

Scientology was the brainchild of L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), a prolific science-fiction writer and accomplished hypnotist who frequently embellished his own past as much as his stories. In 1950 he published a best-selling book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which argued that a huge array of physical infirmities—ulcers, allergies, arthritis, even the common cold—were actually the residue of traumatic experiences (“engrams”) that blocked the full development of the human spirit. The aim was to get “clear” of those negative forces.

In 1953 Hubbard founded the full-fledged Church of Scientology. It was a religion that (as Ron Miscavige explains here) actually had a respectable pedigree: the New Thought movement of the 19th century, whose promoters asserted that illnesses originated in the mind and could be cured by reconnecting with one’s inner immortal “Spirit.” New Thought (as well as Scientology) clearly had its origins in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism, and there are distinct resemblances to Gnosticism and to the Buddhist ideal of escaping the cycle of human suffering. The Scientology practice of “auditing”—talk sessions in which the neophyte explores his past traumas with a specially trained “auditor”—is also something like psychoanalysis, although Hubbard openly scorned conventional theories of mental illness.

Scientology was immediately popular, drawing thousands of followers to L. Ron Hubbard; but it was also expensive, drawing the unwanted attention of government authorities who suspected that the brand-new “church” was actually an elaborate racket. It cost—and still costs—believers more than a hundred thousand of today’s dollars to attain the coveted “clear” status, and the church zealously uses intellectual property laws to ensure that rogue Scientologists trading on their own accounts don’t appropriate Hubbard’s ideas and methods.

Hubbard was accused of practicing medicine without a license, and the FDA looked askance at his “electropsychometer,” or “E-meter,” a device that is supposed to measure changes in an auditee’s state of mind. In 1963 the FBI raided church offices and seized hundreds of E-meters as suspect medical devices; the FDA later won a court order requiring every E-meter to be labeled that it’s being used strictly for spiritual purposes. Entire countries, including France and Germany, have labeled Scientology a dangerous cult.

Feeling persecuted, Hubbard took to the high seas in 1967, acquiring a small fleet of ships, one of which became his residence for the next eight years. Styling himself “the Commodore,” Hubbard established an elite cadre of Scientologists known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org. Sea Org members dressed in quasi-naval uniforms, worked for very little money, and constituted an unconditionally obedient Praetorian Guard around Hubbard. In 1975 Hubbard moved the Sea Org into landlubber status in Clearwater, Florida, although they retained the uniforms. In 1979 he went into seclusion in Hemet, California, a desert town about 90 miles east of Los Angeles where he lived until his death, seeing no one except a handful of trusted confidants. Even his third wife and the mother of four of his seven children, Mary Sue Hubbard, had been banished. The Church of Scientology bought a 520-acre bankrupt resort nearby that became the church’s creative headquarters, known as the Gold Base. Extensively rebuilt and refurbished, the Gold Base currently houses about 800 Sea Org stalwarts.

In 1971, while Hubbard was still at sea, Ron Miscavige moved his entire family—converts all—to a Scientology compound owned by Hubbard called Saint Hill Manor, about 30 miles south of London. David Miscavige had proved to be an even more fervent adherent than his father. By age 12, he had become Scientology’s youngest auditor; in 1976, at 16, he announced his desire to join the Sea Org, and his indulgent father allowed him to drop out of high school to do so.

According to his father’s narrative, David used his youthful years running errands for Hubbard to make himself indispensable to Scientology’s founder—and also to neutralize potential rivals to the throne, including the hapless Mary Sue Hubbard, who in 1979 had taken a fall for her husband for masterminding break-ins and wiretappings of the offices of the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies investigating the church. Mary Sue Hubbard served a year in prison during the early 1980s.

In 1987, a year after L. Ron Hubbard’s death, Miscavige took outright control of the Church of Scientology at age 27, assuming the title of “Captain.” One of his major achievements was to broker a peace between the church and the IRS. In 1993, after lengthy negotiations, the agency agreed to award the church a coveted tax-exempt status as a charitable nonprofit, and the litigious Scientologists dropped the 50-odd lawsuits they had filed against the IRS.

Ron Miscavige joined the Sea Org himself, in 1985, nine years after his famous son. Regarding the move he says: “Becoming part of the Sea Org was never something I was overjoyed about doing.” It does puzzle the reader why any self-respecting father, especially a father nearing 50, would volunteer to be a poorly paid worker bee in a hierarchically ordered hive where his obnoxious son was already occupying the queen slot. The most that can be said is that Ron Miscavige truly believed in Scientology.

Furthermore, back in Philadelphia, and back selling cookware, he had been accused of raping a woman who lived in an apartment building where he had gone to see customers. David Miscavige hired a team of lawyers to help his father, and the case was dismissed at the preliminary hearing when the alleged victim couldn’t positively identify Ron Miscavige as her assailant. The rape charge spelled the end of Ron’s marriage to Loretta. In gratitude for the church’s support during this difficult period, and because he wanted to “help other people and contribute to a group that had the purpose of making a better world,” Ron Miscavige packed his bags and headed first to Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles, and then to the Gold Base, where his son was already occupying lavish quarters and offices, even though L. Ron Hubbard was still alive.

Ron Miscavige had played the trumpet in the Marines and in many a pickup band since, so he was assigned to composing and arranging music for the church’s training films and videos. David, meanwhile, seemed to be metastasizing into the repellent character that nearly all written accounts characterize him as being. His main management strategy was public harangues that could last as long as two hours, designed to grind into dust whatever Sea Org functionary happened to displease him at the moment (including his father on several occasions). He relished forcing errant Sea Orgers to stay up all night redoing some frantically organized project that he deemed hadn’t been done right in the first place.

He also devoted a huge amount of personal energy and Scientology resources to the care and feeding of various Hollywood celebrities who had joined the church. Tom Cruise and John Travolta are the most famous of this bunch, and Cruise in particular became the object of David Miscavige’s most assiduous fawning. At one point, Sea Orgers were forced to create, nearly overnight, a meadow of flowers on the Gold Base property for a visiting Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman to take a carefree romp. (The flower garden was plowed under before Cruise arrived because it didn’t quite meet Miscavige’s specifications.)

The most egregious sinners among them simply disappeared. One of the casualties was David Miscavige’s wife, Shelly, a fellow Sea Orger whom he had married in 1982. Shelly Miscavige hasn’t been seen in public or heard from since 2007, after she reorganized the Sea Org administrative chart without her husband’s permission.

Ron Miscavige put up with this for an astounding quarter-century. What struck me wasn’t so much the misery but the monotony: toiling a hundred hours a week for a paltry $50-a-week allowance; wearing cheesy nautical uniforms; eating three chintzy cafeteria meals every day. As time went on, David Miscavige shrank the occasional days off that had been part of the Hubbard regime into a few hours on Sunday when Sea Org members got to do their laundry. They almost never got time to use the swimming pool, golf course, and exercise facilities that were part of the sumptuously appointed Gold Base.

Life seemed acceptable to Ron Miscavige mostly because he found a second wife in the Sea Org, Becky Bigelow, daughter of racecar driver Tom Bigelow. He married her in 1990. That marriage was a happy one, in contrast to the tumultuous liaison with Loretta. Still, they were watched, Miscavige relates.

Nonetheless, it took many years for Ron and Becky to plot an escape. In March 2012 they loaded up Ron’s car—a gift from David and a rare motor vehicle among the cash-starved Sea Orgers—and sneaked off the Gold Base to freedom in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where Becky’s mother lived. What followed was an odd love-hate tennis match between Ron Miscavige and his son, who was trying to lure him back to California. Ron’s daughters welcomed the escapees at first, then abruptly “disconnected,” apparently on brother David’s orders. The penniless Ron, meanwhile, sent a pleading letter to David begging for financial help, and David duly dispatched him $100,000 plus his share of Loretta’s estate.

In July 2013 Whitewater police informed Ron Miscavige that some private investigators had told them that they had been hired to trail him. The investigators told the cops that they had reported seeing Ron bend over and clutch his chest, which they had interpreted as a heart attack (Miscavige says he was merely securing his cell phone in a pocket). They said that they’d gotten a call from someone who identified himself as David Miscavige saying, “If he dies, he dies. Don’t intervene.” Hence this book—although David, through his lawyers, has denied making that statement.

The Church of Scientology isn’t known for taking accusations lying down. Having acquired a manuscript shortly before Ruthless went to press, the church created a graphically sophisticated website that paints Ron Miscavige as a loser, musical mediocrity, and wife-beater. Numerous photographs show him quaffing booze and otherwise living it up on Scientology excursions; Becky Miscavige is portrayed as a gold-digging onetime Playboy Bunny waiting for Ron to die so she can cash in on the proceeds. Also included are letters from the church’s lawyers to St. Martin’s Press that don’t exactly threaten a lawsuit, which would be extortion, but do imply that one could be forthcoming.

Of course, St. Martin’s Press also has lawyers. I’m sure they vetted Ron Miscavige’s book quite thoroughly, and so far, there haven’t been any signature Scientology court filings. So readers may profitably enjoy this read about a father whose bizarre religious convictions led to his son’s leading him around by the nose for a very long time.

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.