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Mike Rinder served as a senior govt inside the Church of Scientology from 1982-2007, each on the board of administrators and as head of their Workplace of Particular Affairs, lording over the cult-like faith’s public picture. He usually acted as the general public face of Scientology, chatting with the media and placing out PR fires.
Since leaving Scientology in 2007, he’s change into one of many world’s premier Scientology whistleblowers, showing within the HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Jail of Perception, co-hosting the Emmy-winning A&E docuseriesLeah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, and presently co-hosting the Scientology podcast Honest Recreation (additionally with Remini). His new memoir, A Billion Years: My Escape from a Life within the Highest Ranks of Scientology, out Sept. 27 from Simon & Schuster, chronicles his time inside the shadowy group, the alleged abuses he witnessed, and his dealings with its chief David Miscavige.
On this unique excerpt from A Billion Years, Rinder writes about Scientology’s net of celebrities.
One factor Hubbard wouldn’t have wished omitted was his brushes with celebrities. He was fascinated by them, and he name-dropped continuously, claiming affiliation and interplay particularly with Hollywood figures even throughout his time as a author of pulp fiction. This fascination continued into Scientology, the place he started to see them as a way of gaining publicity and acceptance. He even had a listing of “goal” celebrities to be lured into Scientology to assist make it well-liked, and within the early ’70s he created the Superstar Centre—a Scientology group devoted to the recruiting of celebrities in Hollywood. Miscavige additionally believed within the worth of celebrities, and devoted plenty of time and a spotlight to them. What was vital to Miscavige grew to become the precedence for his underlings. –Mike Rinder
My days had been countless, filled with holding observe of Scientology’s enemies, conducting applications to neutralize them, placing out fires on the web, and coping with the fixed celeb points.
Simon & Schuster
Maybe the strangest celeb encounter I had was with Michael Jackson. I grew to become the go-to individual in Scientology for Lisa Marie Presley throughout her marriage to Jacko. Her mom, Priscilla, had change into concerned in Scientology when Lisa Marie was younger, and so she had been raised a Scientologist. She enlisted me in her efforts to transform Michael to Scientology, or a minimum of to persuade him to just accept it. I gave them each a personal tour of the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. All through the tour, Michael was extraordinarily paranoid. He repeatedly dove to the ground, whimpering that he had seen somebody taking pictures of him by the home windows, although there was no line of sight to any publicly accessible location. Lisa Marie laughed it off and defined that he was all the time frightened in regards to the paparazzi. He was so soft-spoken I might hardly hear him, and his feedback and questions had been disjointed and infantile. She had informed me she thought Michael understood her as a result of he had grown up within the media highlight and by no means actually had a childhood, just like her personal expertise because the daughter of the King. Nevertheless it was to not final—they divorced in 1996.
In March 1995 I flew to Wichita, Kansas, to attend the grand opening of a particular Scientology mission. Miscavige had been pushing exhausting for celebrities to change into extra energetic in selling Scientology, and Kirstie Alley was the primary to take the step of placing cash into opening a mission in her hometown. After the 1982 mission holder fiasco, few folks had stepped as much as open new missions, which had diminished the circulate of latest recruits into Scientology. Celebrities doing so would popularize the thought once more. Alley was a longtime Scientologist who credited Scientology with curing her drug habit. She had change into a star on Cheers and was shut buddies with John Travolta, who had been on the prime of the Scientology celeb heap earlier than Tom Cruise, although his profession was now on a downward trajectory on the time when Cruise’s was heading to the stratosphere.
Travolta the truth is piloted us all on his Gulfstream from LA to Wichita. I sat throughout from his spouse, Kelly Preston, and performed playing cards with Isaac Hayes and Lisa Marie Presley within the again (they might subsequently be persuaded to open a mission in Memphis). Kelly shocked me when she informed me she had lived in Adelaide throughout her teen years, only a mile from the place I lived, and had attended the sister college of the all-boys college the place I had spent a few years.
Tom Cruise didn’t attend, as he was capturing Mission: Unimaginable, however his presence within the Scientology orbit loomed bigger than ever earlier than. He was the largest star on the earth, and Miscavige was utilizing this to his benefit. Regardless of the IRS victory, the German authorities nonetheless refused to acknowledge Scientology, believing the group contradicted the nation’s values and structure. The thought of making a world of supermen (Clears) and changing wog regulation and authorities with Scientology ideas reduce too near the bone of the sooner grasp race and its “Deutschland über alles” pondering for his or her liking. Miscavige wished a marketing campaign performed towards Germany, primarily based on the Hubbard dictate of all the time attacking: on this case, claiming that the German authorities was persecuting Scientology identical to the Nazis had persecuted the Jews. I used to be instructed by Miscavige to get Hollywood powerhouse lawyer Bert Fields, who was Cruise’s legal professional, to assist out. With Tom’s blessing, Bert took the reason for the supposed persecution of our faith in Germany personally. In January 1997, he purchased a full-page advert within the Worldwide Herald Tribune designated “An Open Letter to Helmut Kohl,” signed by a lot of his shoppers and buddies, together with Goldie Hawn, Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Stone, and others, decrying the acts of the German authorities towards Scientology. The nation stood its floor, however the try did show the mettle in Tom Cruise’s star energy.
Tom Cruise speaks in the course of the inauguration of the Church of Scientology in Madrid, Spain, on Sept. 18, 2004.
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With Tom as Miscavige’s most vital asset, the actor’s considerations grew to become Scientology’s considerations. When Cruise grew to become conscious of an unauthorized biography by British writer Wensley Clarkson, Miscavige informed Cruise, “I'll care for this for you.” I used to be dispatched to London with Scientology in-house lawyer Invoice Drescher to cope with the writer and ensure nothing unfavorable appeared within the e-book. Sure, a church lawyer and the top of the Workplace of Particular Affairs had been appearing on behalf of Tom Cruise, paid for by the Church of Scientology. With plenty of persistence and veiled threats, we persuaded the writer to permit us to “evaluate and proper” something associated to Scientology within the manuscript. We went to the Blake Publishing places of work in West London and picked up a duplicate of the manuscript from the editor. We took it again to our room on the Savoy resort and spent two days cleaning it of something unfavorable in return for a promise to not sue. In fact, the e-book didn’t reveal something new, nevertheless it did include a few of what we thought-about the standard “inaccuracies” about Scientology—calling the E-Meter a lie detector and saying that Scientologists imagine in aliens and that it prices some huge cash. Within the total scheme of issues, had we carried out nothing to the manuscript, it will have made no distinction to Scientology or Cruise, nevertheless it was one other “see what I can do for you” feather in Miscavige’s cap with Cruise.
In 1997, cracks began to point out within the relationship between Cruise and Miscavige in the course of the filming of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Extensive Shut. Costars Tom and Nicole had been successfully reduce off from the world for a 12 months because the infamous perfectionist Kubrick demanded reshoot after reshoot on the extremely secretive closed set in London. Dropping the day-to-day interplay with Miscavige and spending his time with Nicole had an impact on Tom. He was not checking in with Dave and even returning his calls. Miscavige, fretting that Nicole was pulling Tom out of Scientology, despatched me to London to satisfy with Tom’s sister Lee Anne on the Dorchester resort to attempt to discover out what was occurring. Lee Anne, a devoted Scientologist following within the footsteps of her brother (he obtained his three sisters and mom in), claimed every little thing was positive and so they had been simply busy, however Miscavige didn’t purchase it.
Kelly Preston, John Travolta, and Priscilla Presley attend the Church of Scientology Superstar Heart forty second anniversary gala held on the Church of Scientology Superstar Heart on Aug. 6, 2011, in Hollywood, California.
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Not one to surrender, Miscavige tasked Marty Rathbun with getting Cruise again within the fold. Rathbun started auditing Cruise beneath the direct supervision of Miscavige. As Cruise was progressively drawn again into the world of Scientology, he rededicated himself to the trigger. This created a distance between him and Nicole. Rathbun labored with Bert Fields to rent notorious PI Anthony Pellicano to spy on Nicole and faucet her telephones. Rathbun additionally turned their two adopted kids, Isabella and Connor, towards Nicole by indoctrinating them into the Hubbard teachings of Suppressive Individuals. When Tom and Nicole divorced, Miscavige was glad that the “unfavorable affect” of Nicole was now not dragging Tom away. Cruise thereafter grew to become extra fervent in his vocal public help of Scientology—and Miscavige.
Whereas Marty was coping with Cruise, I used to be tasked with the job of serving to John Travolta with some public relations points. Because the starting of the ’90s, Travolta had been hounded by tales from numerous alleged male lovers, together with certainly one of his former pilots in addition to a porn star. I met with John and his legal professional, Jay Lavely, to assist navigate these land mines. The Nationwide Enquirer reached out to Travolta and the church for responses. Realizing the potential PR injury a narrative of homosexual intercourse would have on the proper Scientology couple of John and Kelly, we dug up dust on the sources of the tales and threatened the media with lawsuits. The tales had been shut down, and I grew to become a trusted individual in John’s life. Related claims have continued to pop up over time and so they have been denied by Travolta or shut down. Homosexual allegations are land mines for Scientology. Scientology publicly claims it's not anti-gay (regardless of Hubbard’s writings on the contrary), but the specter of a narrative describing a Scientologist as homosexual would trigger panic internally as a result of for a Scientologist, not being “cured” of homosexuality would point out that the tech doesn’t work.
When handy, our public statements had been “We don't become involved in commenting on the private lives of our parishioners, celeb or in any other case.” In fact, we had been very a lot concerned in all features of their personal lives. This was not reserved solely for the 2 huge headliners, Cruise and Travolta. Kirstie Alley and her actor husband, Parker Stevenson, had been dropped at the Int Base to “resolve their marriage,” although Miscavige was not so all in favour of them personally—Kirstie was previous her peak in Hollywood. I used to be the couple’s designated companion whereas they obtained their “marriage counseling.” I joined them for meals every day for the week or in order that they had been there and engaged them in small discuss. They ate within the tiny bar/café within the constructing that had been transformed, theme-park fashion, to appear like an previous four-masted clipper ship, subsequent to the big swimming pool reserved for Miscavige and his friends. Regardless of the circumstances, Kirstie was an entertaining mealtime companion—outrageous, humorous, and generally inappropriately gross. Parker was a particularly nice man whose solely obvious flaw was his lack of curiosity in Scientology. We didn’t discuss their marriage in any respect; that was off-limits. However I might inform Kirstie had determined there was no future for her with Parker and so the outcome was inevitable: divorce. Parker was “not into” Scientology. And to the group, that was all that mattered.
Excerpted from A BILLION YEARS by Mike Rinder. Copyright © 2022 by Michael Rinder. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.