In April, John Travolta met with President Bill Clinton at a conference on volunteerism in Philadelphia. It was a freighted moment for the president, since Travolta was portraying a character based on him in the forthcoming movie Primary Colors. “He said he wanted to help me out with the situation in Germany,” Travolta later said. “He had a roommate years ago who was a Scientologist and had really liked him, and respected his views on it. He said he felt we were given an unfair hand in that country, and that he wanted to fix it.” Clinton set up a meeting for Travolta and Cruise with Sandy Berger, his national security advisor, who was given the additional assignment of being the administration’s “Scientology point person.”
None of this had any effect on Travolta’s character in the film, as the movie had already been shot, nor on Germany’s policy toward the church, which refused to recognize Scientology as a religion or allow members to join political parties. However, the US State Department began pressuring the German government on behalf of Scientology. The Germans were puzzled that their American counterparts seemed not to know or care about the church’s RPF camps, which the Germans called penal colonies, and the reported practices of confinement, forced confessions, and punishing physical labor, which they said amounted to brainwashing. There was a belief within the German cabinet that the church’s real goal was to infiltrate the government and create a Scientology superstate. “This is not a church or a religious organization,” the labor minister, Norbert Blum, told Maclean’s magazine. “Scientology is a machine for manipulating human beings.”
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1 Behar says that a private investigator, posing as a distraught parent, called him and begged for help with a child who had gone into Scientology. Behar had referred the caller to the Cult Awareness Network. He says he never advised kidnapping. The private investigator taped the conversation, and Behar’s attorneys subpoenaed the tape for his defense in the lawsuit brought by the church.
2 Cruise, through his attorney, denies that he ever retreated from his commitment to Scientology.
3 A spokesperson for Time categorically denied this charge.
4 According to a church spokesperson, “Mr. Miscavige was not involved in any aspect of Ms. McPherson’s spiritual progress in Scientology.”
5 The church denies that Miscavige has abused any members of the church, saying that the abuse claims have been propagated by a “group of vociferous anti-Scientologists.”
8
Bohemian Rhapsody
Paul Haggis and Deborah Rennard married in 1997, soon after Paul’s divorce from Diane became final. Paul was still seeking joint custody of his three daughters. Without consulting him, Diane had taken Lauren and Katy out of the Delphi Academy, apparently intending to enroll them in public school. Paul and Diane were ordered by the court to undergo psychiatric evaluation, a procedure that Scientology abhors. In December 1998, the court surprised everyone by awarding Paul full custody of his daughters. According to court records, the ruling followed the discovery that the girls were not enrolled in school at all.
The girls were stunned. They had watched the hostilities through Diane’s eyes. No one had prepared them for the possibility that they might be taken from her—until then, it had been the three girls and their mother against the world. The girls thought the decision was unbalanced and unfairly influenced by the fact that their father had more money. Alissa vowed she would never speak to him again.
Haggis was also caught short by the court’s decision. In addition to the year-old son, James, he had with Deborah, he suddenly had two teenage daughters on his hands as well. (Alissa was twenty-one at the time, and lived on her own.) The girls felt uprooted and they missed the emotional support of their mother. They didn’t resent Deborah; actually, they appreciated her advocacy and the way she balanced out Paul. Still, it was a difficult adjustment for everyone.
Paul put the girls in a private school, but that lasted only six months. They weren’t entirely comfortable talking to people who weren’t Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. They demanded to be sent to a boarding institution on an isolated hilltop near Sheridan, Oregon, called the Delphian School—or the “mother school,” as it was known to Scientologists.