“TOMMY,” HAGGIS’S LETTER of August 19, 2009, abruptly begins. “As you know, for ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.”
The tone of the letter is both aggrieved and outraged, mixing Haggis’s personal experiences with the results of his one-man investigation into the church. He mentions how Katy Haggis’s friends had turned against her when she came out to them as a lesbian. Katy had told him that another friend of hers had applied to be the assistant for Jenna and Bodhi Elfman, the Scientology acting couple. Lauren Haigney, Tom Cruise’s niece in the Sea Org, had been assigned to vet the applicants. Katy says that Lauren wrote up a report saying that Katy’s friend was known to hang out with lesbians. The friend did not get the job, Katy said.6
Haggis also recounted the scene at John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s house, when another Scientologist made the slur about the gay waiter. “I admire John and Kelly for many reasons; one of them is the way they handled that,” Haggis stated. “You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and then quote LRH in their defense.” He said that the church’s decision not to denounce the bigots who supported Proposition 8 was cowardly. “Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.”
He referenced Davis’s interview on CNN. “I saw you deny the church’s policy of disconnection. You said straight-out there was no such policy, that it did not exist,” he wrote. “I was shocked. We all know this policy exists. I didn’t have to search for verification. I didn’t have to look any further than my own home.” He reminded Davis of Deborah’s experience with her parents. “Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them.… That’s not ancient history, Tommy. It was a year ago.” He added: “To see you lie so easily, I am afraid to ask myself: what else are you lying about?”
Then, he said, he had read the series of articles in the St. Petersburg Times. “They left me dumbstruck and horrified. These were not the claims made by ‘outsiders’ looking to dig up dirt against us. These accusations were made by top international executives who had devoted most of their lives to the church. Say what you will about them now, these were staunch defenders of the church, including Mike Rinder, the church’s official spokesman for 20 years!
“Tommy, if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civil rights violations.”
He continued:
And when I pictured you assuring me that it is all lies, that this is nothing but an unfounded and vicious attack by a group of disgruntled employees, I am afraid that I saw the same face that looked in the camera and denied the policy of disconnection. I heard the same voice that professed outrage at our support of Proposition 8, who promised to correct it, and did nothing.
I was left feeling outraged, and frankly, more than a little stupid.
Haggis was especially disturbed by the way the church’s Freedom magazine had responded to the newspaper’s revelations. It included a lengthy annotated transcript of conversations that had taken place prior to the publication of the series between the Times reporters, Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, and representatives of the church, including Tommy Davis and Jessica Feshbach, the two international spokespersons for the church. In the Freedom account, the names of the defectors were never actually stated, perhaps to shield Scientologists from the shock of seeing familiar figures such as Marty Rathbun and Amy Scobee publicly denouncing the organization and its leader. Rathbun was called “Kingpin” and Amy Scobee “The Adulteress.” At one point in the conversation, Davis had told reporters that Scobee had been expelled from the church because she had had an affair. The reporters responded that she had denied any sexual contact outside her marriage. “That’s a lie,” Davis told them. Feshbach, who carried a stack of documents, then said, “She has a written admission [of] each one of her instances of extramarital indiscretions.… I believe there were five.”
When Haggis read this, he immediately assumed that the church had gotten its information from auditing sessions.7 He was inflamed. “A priest would go to jail before revealing secrets from the confessional, no matter what the cost to himself or his church,” he wrote. “You took Amy Scobee’s most intimate admissions about her sexual life and passed them on to the press and then smeared them all over the pages of your newsletter!…This is the woman who joined the Sea Org at 16! She ran the entire celebrity center network, and was a loyal senior executive of the church for what, 20 years?” He added that he was aware that the church might do the same to him. “Well, luckily, I have never held myself up to be anyone’s role model.”