When I first contacted Tommy Davis, last April, he expressed a reluctance to talk, saying that he had already spent a month responding to Paul Haggis. "It made little difference," he said. "The last thing I'm interested in is dredging all this up again." He kept putting me off, saying that he was too busy to get together, but he promised that we would meet when he was more available. In an e-mail, he said, "We should plan on spending at least a full day together as there is a lot I would want to show you." We finally arranged to meet on Memorial Day weekend.
I flew to Los Angeles and waited for him to call. On Sunday at three o'clock, Davis appeared at my hotel, with Feshbach. We sat at a table on the patio. Davis has his mother's sleepy eyes. His thick black hair was combed forward, with a lock falling boyishly onto his forehead. He wore a wheat-colored suit with a blue shirt. Feshbach, a slender, attractive woman, anxiously twirled her hair.
Davis now told me that he was "not willing to participate in, or contribute to, an article about Scientology through the lens of Paul Haggis." I had come to Los Angeles specifically to talk to him, at a time he had chosen. I asked if he had been told not to talk to me. He said no.
Feshbach said that she had spoken to Mark Isham, whom I had interviewed the day before. "He talked to you about what are supposed to be our confidential scriptures." Any discussion of the church's secret doctrines was offensive, she said.
In my meeting with Isham, he asserted that Scientology was not a "faith-based religion." I pointed out that, in Scientology's upper levels, there was a cosmology that would have to be accepted on faith. Isham said that he wasn't going to discuss the details of O.T. III. "In the wrong hands, it can hurt people," he said.
"Everything I have to say about Paul, I've already said," Davis told me. He agreed, however, to respond to written questions about the church.
In late September, Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, travelled to Manhattan to meet with me and six staff members of The New Yorker. In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet.
Davis, early in his presentation, attacked the credibility of Scientology defectors, whom he calls "bitter apostates." He said, "They make up stories." He cited Bryan Wilson, an Oxford sociologist, who has argued that testimony from the disaffected should be treated skeptically, noting, "The apostate is generally in need of self-justification. He seeks to reconstruct his own past to excuse his former affiliations and to blame those who were formerly his closest associates."
Davis spoke about Gerry Armstrong, a former Scientology archivist who copied, without permission, many of the church's files on Hubbard, and who settled in a fraud suit against the church in 1986. Davis charged that Armstrong had forged many of the documents that he later disseminated in order to discredit the church's founder. He also alleged that Armstrong had spread rumors of a 1967 letter in which Hubbard told his wife that he was "drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and grays" while researching the Operating Thetan material. Davis also noted that, in 1984, Armstrong had been captured on videotape telling a friend, "I can create documents with relative ease. You know, I did for a living." Davis's decision to cite this evidence was curious--though the quote cast doubt on Armstrong's ethics, it also suggested that forging documents had once been part of a Scientologist's job.
Davis passed around a photograph of Armstrong, which, he said, showed Armstrong "sitting naked" with a giant globe in his lap. "This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money," Davis said. "He's not a very sane person."
Armstrong told me that, in the photo, he is actually wearing running shorts under the globe. The article is about his attempt to create a movement for people to "abandon the use of currency." He said that he received eight hundred thousand dollars in the 1986 settlement and had given most of the money away. (The settlement prohibited Armstrong from talking about Scientology, a prohibition that he has ignored, and the church has won two breach-of-contract suits against him, including a five-hundred-thousand-dollar judgment in 2004.)
Davis also displayed photographs of what he said were bruises sustained by Mike Rinder's former wife in 2010, after Rinder physically assaulted her in a Florida parking lot. (Rinder denies committing any violence. A sheriff's report supports this.) Davis also showed a mug shot of Marty Rathbun in a jailhouse jumpsuit, after being arrested in New Orleans last July for public drunkenness. "Getting arrested for being drunk on the intersection of Bourbon and Toulouse?" Davis cracked. "That's like getting arrested for being a leper in a leper colony." (Rathbun's arrest has been expunged.) Claire and Marc Headley were "the most despicable people in the world"; Jeff Hawkins was "an inveterate liar."
I asked how, if these people were so reprehensible, they had all arrived at such elevated positions in the church. "They weren't like that when they were in those positions," Davis responded. The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientology's ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested to Davis that Scientology didn't seem to work if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, and embezzlers.
Scientology, Davis said, doesn't pretend to be perfect, and it shouldn't be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. "I haven't done things like that," Davis said. "I haven't suborned perjury, destroyed evidence, lied--contrary to what Paul Haggis says." He spoke of his frustration with Haggis after his resignation: "If he was so troubled and shaken on the fundamentals of Scientology... then why the hell did he stick around for thirty-five years?" He continued, "Did he stay a closet Scientologist for some career-advancement purpose?" Davis shook his head in disgust. "I think he's the most hypocritical person in the world."
We discussed the allegations of abuse lodged against Miscavige. "The only people who will corroborate are their fellow-apostates," Davis said. He produced affidavits from other Scientologists refuting the accusations, and noted that the tales about Miscavige always hinged on "inexplicable violent outbursts." Davis said, "One would think that if such a thing occurred--which it most certainly did not--there'd have to be a reason."
I had wondered about these stories as well. While Rinder and Rathbun were in the church, they had repeatedly claimed that allegations of abuse were baseless. Then, after Rinder defected, he said that Miscavige had beaten him fifty times. Rathbun has confessed that, in 1997, he ordered incriminating documents destroyed in the case of Lisa McPherson, the Scientologist who died of an embolism. If these men were capable of lying to protect the church, might they not also be capable of lying to destroy it? Davis later claimed that Rathbun is in fact trying to overthrow Scientology's current leadership and take over the church. (Rathbun now makes his living by providing Hubbard-inspired counselling to other defectors, but he says that he has no desire to be part of a hierarchical organization. "Power corrupts," he says.)
Twelve other defectors told me that they had been beaten by Miscavige, or had witnessed Miscavige beating other church staff members. Most of them, like John Peeler, noted that Miscavige's demeanor changed "like the snap of a finger." Others who never saw such violence spoke of their constant fear of the leader's anger.
At the meeting, Davis brought up Jack Parsons's black-magic society, which Hubbard had supposedly infiltrated. Davis said, "He was sent in there by Robert Heinlein"--the science-fiction writer--"who was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time." Davis said, "A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that we'd never been able to before." The book to which Davis was referring is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention in the book of Heinlein's sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring, on the part of naval intelligence or any other organization. Patterson says that he looked into the matter, at the suggestion of Scientologists, but found nothing.
Davis and I discussed an assertion that Marty Rathbun had made to me about the O.T. III creation story--the galactic revelations that Haggis had deemed "madness." While Hubbard was in exile, Rathbun told me, he wrote a memo suggesting an experiment in which ascending Scientologists skipped the O.T. III level. Miscavige shelved the idea, Rathbun told me. Davis called Rathbun's story "libellous." He explained that the cornerstone of Scientology was the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. "Mr. Hubbard's material must be and is applied precisely as written," Davis said. "It's never altered. It's never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology."
But hadn't certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbard's books been changed after his death?
Davis admitted that that was so, but he maintained that "the current editions are one-hundred-per-cent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote." Davis said they were checked against Hubbard's original dictation.
"The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation?" I asked.
"No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot," Davis replied.
"Somebody put the material in those--?"
"I can only imagine.... It wasn't Mr. Hubbard," Davis said, cutting me off.
"Who would've done it?"
"I have no idea."
"Hmm."
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