Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [114]
By the summer and fall of 1995, when Lisa McPherson was struggling most profoundly, Miscavige, though not a highly trained auditor (by all accounts, the leader's experience with auditing others stopped after his teenage forays at Saint Hill in the early 1970s), began to take control of the auditing delivered at the base. One summer evening, Headley was in the Flag auditorium when Miscavige held a briefing. In attendance were all of Flag's top auditors, men and women who were revered throughout the church for their years of expertise in counseling and understanding the intricacies of Hubbard's processes.* The leader was infuriated, as Headley recalled, by the slowness and, as he viewed it, the arbitrariness of auditing at Flag: some clients advanced very quickly, while others floundered for years. As an example, Miscavige cited the case of Lisa McPherson, who, he told his staff, had paid for a large number of services and should be treated with the best of care.
The leader began to leaf through Lisa's auditing folder, pointing out things that had been done wrong concerning her case. As Headley recalled it, "He told the staff that he was going to review her folders and make sure that she was being handled correctly."
Whether Miscavige took an interest in Lisa's case purely by chance, or because of his budding friendship with Bennetta Slaughter—several ex-officials suggest the latter not long after this meeting, Tom De Vocht, who headed the Commodore's Messenger Organization at Flag, recalled Miscavige personally supervising several of Lisa McPherson's auditing sessions.
Standing in a control room, with video feeds from several different counseling rooms, Miscavige could see everything that went on during Lisa's counseling. As De Vocht recalled, "He's watching live with the video cameras every session that she's in and [supervising], saying 'Do this next, do that next' and so forth." He watched Miscavige make notations on Lisa's auditing folder, which De Vocht also saw being taken in and out of Miscavige's office in Clearwater, which was next to his own.
Another former top Flag official, Don Jason, said he witnessed Miscavige watching one of Lisa's sessions; Miscavige then took off his headphones and announced that she had achieved the state of Clear. According to Jason, Miscavige wrote a note to Lisa's auditor, declaring her new status. "He wrote out a very lengthy four-page communication to her ... by hand, I watched him do it," Jason told me. "Then it was typed up and she went into session and was told she was Clear." It was notable, he said, because Scientology staffers are required to take a special course to help them identify a person who's become Clear. He wasn't aware that Miscavige had completed that course.
Marty Rathbun was also at the Fort Harrison on the day that Lisa became Clear. He'd been walking down a corridor of the closed-off floor where auditing sessions were held, when a door to one of the auditing rooms suddenly kicked open and a woman's voice could be heard whooping with joy. Rathbun was shocked—noise of any sort is strictly prohibited near auditing rooms—but there was something more than that, a strange quality to Lisa's voice. When he returned to the RTC office later that day, he mentioned Lisa to Angie Trent, the RTC official in charge of supervising Flag's technical training. "You've got somebody up [at the Fort Harrison] who just attested to Clear who looks to me to be on the verge of psychosis," Rathbun said.
Trent told him to mind his own business. "That's Lisa McPherson. David Miscavige is programming her case," she said. In other words, as Rathbun interpreted it, he ought to "buzz off."
Six weeks later, Rathbun and other top-level staff were informed that Lisa McPherson had suffered a psychotic break and that Miscavige, who was now in Los Angeles, would be directing the staff on how