Tommy Davis had produced nine senior church executives who told the Times that the abuse had never taken place. Dan Sherman, the church’s official Hubbard biographer and Miscavige’s speechwriter, recounted a scene in which he observed Miscavige talking to an injured sparrow. “It was immensely tender,” Sherman told the reporters.
Much of the abuse being alleged had taken place at Gold Base. Haggis had visited the place only once, in the early 1980s, when its existence was still a closely held secret. That was when he was preparing to direct the Scientology commercial that was ultimately rejected. At first glance, it seemed like a spa, beautiful and restful; but he had been put off by the uniforms, the security, and the militarized feel of the place.
“At the top of the church, people were whacking folks about like Laurel and Hardy,” Haggis said. He was embarrassed to admit that he had never even asked himself where Rathbun and Rinder had gone. He decided to call Rathbun, who was now living on Galveston Bay in South Texas. Although the two men had never met, they were well known to each other. After being one of the most powerful figures in Scientology, Rathbun was scraping together a living by freelancing stories to local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark. He figured that South Texas was about as far from Los Angeles and Clearwater as he could hope to get. Haggis was floored when he learned that Rathbun had had to escape. He was also surprised to learn that other friends, such as Jim Logan, the man who brought him into the church so long ago on the street corner in Ontario, had also fled or been declared Suppressive Persons. One of Haggis’s closest friends in the church hierarchy, Bill Dendiu, told Haggis that he had escaped from Gold Base by driving a car—actually, an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through the fence. He still had scars on his forehead to show for that.
“What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?” Haggis wondered.
He also came across a number of anti-Scientology websites, including Exscientologykids.com, which was created by Jenna Miscavige Hill, the leader’s niece, who joined the Sea Org when she was twelve. For her and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the organization, leaving them ill prepared for life outside the church. Jenna says that for much of her early life, she was kept in a camp with other Sea Org children and little adult supervision. They rarely saw their parents. “We ran ourselves completely,” she recalled.
For several years, Haggis had been working with a charity he established to set up schools in Haiti. These stories reminded him of the child slaves he had encountered in that country. “They were ten, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their parents go along with this!” he said of the Sea Org children. “And they work morning, noon and night.… Scrubbing pots, manual labor—that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me!”
AFTER TOM CRUISE’S BEHAVIOR on Oprah and the Today show, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owns Paramount Studios, chose not to renew Cruise’s deal. “He turned off all women,” Redstone explained. “He was embarrassing the studio. And he was costing us a lot of money.” Cruise and his longtime producing partner, Paula Wagner, worked out a deal with MGM to resurrect the struggling United Artists studio. Soon after that, Wagner approached Haggis, offering him a very generous deal. He wrote one script for them, a big-budget children’s movie, but the studio was so financially pressed that it couldn’t afford to produce it.