Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [127]
"If it isn't written, it isn't true," L. Ron Hubbard had always told his followers.
Rathbun gathered the three or four most incriminating logs. "Lose 'em," he said to an aide. Then he walked out of the room.*
From the day after the Tampa Tribune ran its first December 1996 story on the case, the Church of Scientology went on the attack, using every technique in Hubbard's arsenal. Its officials accused the Clearwater police of harassment and religious discrimination and insisted that the rigorous coverage of the case in the St. Petersburg Times was meant to "forward an agenda of hate." They also accused Dr. Joan Wood of "lying" on Lisa's autopsy report and then sued for her medical records. After a Pinellas County circuit judge allowed the church to see five pages of Wood's records, Scientology hired its own forensics experts to review her findings.
Agents Strope and Andrews, in the meantime, continued to assist the state attorney as he debated whether to bring criminal charges. The investigators and attorneys knew that the Church of Scientology would view that as a declaration of war. It might also prove difficult to refute the church's experts, which soon included such luminaries as Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City and a former member of the O. J. Simpson defense team. With a seemingly bottomless war chest, the church apparently had no problem paying Baden, who'd testified during the Simpson trial that he customarily worked for $2,000 to $3,000 per day.†
These were the challenges facing the state. Complicating matters for the church was a civil suit filed in February 1997 by Lisa McPherson's family, charging the Church of Scientology with wrongful death. The church's Los Angeles–based lawyer, Elliot Abelson, called the suit "an extortion attempt" and maintained that Lisa would be outraged by the actions being taken in her name. "Lisa McPherson loved the church, and the church loved Lisa," he said.
But the McPhersons' trial lawyer, Kennan Dandar, sued for access to church documents, and soon Scientology's sanitized version of events—Abelson long argued that Lisa had luxuriated in four-star comfort during her stay at the Fort Harrison—began to wear thin. In July 1997, a Florida court ordered the church to release the caretaker logs, which, save the few that Rathbun had ordered destroyed, were intact, amounting to thirty-three pages. Their exposure sent church attorneys scrambling to revise their version of events. Yes, Lisa had been "psychotic," the church admitted; but the Scientologists had done the best they could for her. "What the documents demonstrate are very caring women who went to extraordinary lengths to care for a person who was deeply mentally ill," said the attorney Morris Weinberg. "They knew they could not take her to a psychiatrist because of their religious beliefs ... People weren't trying to hurt her; they were trying to help her."
At Scientology's International Base at Gilman Hot Springs, in the vast California scrubland near Hemet, David Miscavige, by all accounts, was obsessed by the Lisa McPherson case. A man known to "react really insanely to bad media," as Rathbun said, the leader of Scientology was now reading about the death of this one Florida parishioner every day. Each new development, whether in the criminal investigation or the civil suit, was covered relentlessly by the Tampa Bay media. McPherson's death had also been reported by national publications such as Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and it was getting significant play abroad, particularly in Germany, where Scientology was considered a potentially dangerous cult.
Critics of Scientology discussed the case in Internet chat rooms and set up anti-Scientology websites in Lisa McPherson's name. Former Scientologists from as far away as Greece and Australia