“Brainwashing is a crime,” Davis said.
“Listen to me! You were not there! At the beginning! Of the interview!” Sweeney shouted in an oddly slow cadence. “You did not hear! Or record! The interview!”
“Do you understand that brainwashing is a crime?” Davis said, unfazed by Sweeney’s enraged screams.
Davis’s composure and his spirited defense of his church made quite a contrast with the sputtering and eventually deeply chagrined reporter, who apologized to BBC viewers on the air.
In March 2007, John Travolta’s new movie, Wild Hogs, a comedy about two middle-aged men who decide to become bikers, was scheduled to open in Britain. Concerned that Sweeney would confront Travolta during the publicity for the film, Rinder and Davis planned to travel together to London, but on the day of departure, Davis failed to show up. Someone went to his room, but he was nowhere to be found. Rinder had to travel to London alone. He learned from Miscavige’s communicator that Davis had blown. Sweeney immediately sensed that something was up and kept pestering Rinder about where Davis was. Rinder told him Davis had the flu.
As part of the film promotion, Travolta arrived at the red-carpet London premiere on a motorcycle. Sweeney was standing in the crowd in Leicester Square, well away from the star, crying out, “Are you a member of a sinister, brainwashing cult?” Travolta’s fans shouted Sweeney down.
Later, Sweeney asked Rinder if it was true that Miscavige had beaten him, claiming to have an eyewitness.
“Who’s the witness?” Rinder asked.
“He wishes to remain confidential because he says he is scared.”
“John, that is typical of what you do,” Rinder said.
“He says that David Miscavige knocked you to the ground.”
“Absolute rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, not true, rubbish.”
Rinder threatened to sue if Sweeney aired such allegations. When the BBC program ran, there was no mention of physical abuse. Rinder felt that he had spared the church considerable embarrassment. But, far from being grateful, Miscavige told him that Sweeney’s piece should never have run at all. He ordered Rinder to report to an RPF facility in England. Rinder decided he’d had enough. He blew.
Davis called the church and returned voluntarily from Las Vegas, where he had been hiding.5 He was sent to Clearwater, where he was security-checked by Jessica Feshbach. The aim of the check is to gain a confession using an E-Meter. It can function as a powerful form of thought control.
Davis and Feshbach subsequently married.
ON A RAINY MORNING in late September 2010, I finally got my meeting with Tommy Davis. The profile of Paul Haggis I had been preparing was nearing publication. Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, traveled to Manhattan to meet with me; my editor, Daniel Zalewski, and David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker; the two lead fact-checkers on the story, Jennifer Stahl and Tim Farrington, as well as the head of the magazine’s fact-checking department, Peter Canby; and our lawyer, Lynn Oberlander. Leading the Scientology legal delegation was Anthony Michael Glassman, a former assistant US attorney who now has a boutique law firm in Beverly Hills, specializing in representing movie stars. On his website, he boasts of a $10 million judgment against The New York Times. The stakes were obvious to everyone.