Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [142]
This included spreading Scientology's message beyond Hollywood. It helped that the church's roster now included the legal analyst Greta Van Susteren and her husband, the powerful Washington lawyer John Coale, as well as the singer Sonny Bono, who had studied Scientology in the 1970s and 1980s and was elected to Congress in 1994. Having a presence in Washington had always been a priority of the church, and Bono became a vocal advocate for Scientology-related causes in the House of Representatives. He was particularly instrumental in helping the Church of Scientology fight a number of copyright-infringement cases, notably one against the Internet service provider Netcom, on which a Scientology critic had posted some of the church's secret doctrine.
Bono also joined several other members of Congress in appealing to the U.S. trade representative, Charlene Barshevsky, to put pressure on Sweden, which had allowed public access to Scientology doctrine, costing the church millions of dollars in lost income, its leaders claimed. Swedish law permitted free access to any published work, regardless of copyright. Nonetheless, Barshevsky threatened to put Sweden on a U.S. government watch list of countries that violated international trade agreements unless it complied. In October 1997, under pressure from Congress, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the State Department, and the Commerce Department, Sweden agreed to pass tougher copyright-protection laws that would stop the infringement of Scientology's secret doctrine.
But if anyone helped get the church's message across in Washington it was John Travolta. No longer the reticent star, Travolta had spent much of the 1990s promoting Scientology outright. ("I never defended Scientology," he told an interviewer from Playboy, adding that he felt more of an urge to "enlighten others about it.") By the late 1990s, Travolta had become an outspoken supporter of Scientology's ongoing campaign against the German government, which had been investigating the Scientology movement since the early 1990s. Germany was notably hard on groups it suspected of cultlike activities, and it viewed Scientology as a threat to its system of democracy. German Scientologists claimed to have been fired from jobs and prevented from joining political parties because of their affiliation with the church. Some claimed their children had been turned away from local kindergartens.
In response to these reports, Travolta's attorney, Bertram Fields, wrote an open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, which was published in January 1997 in theInternational Herald Tribune and reprinted in several U.S. papers, including Hollywood's own Daily Variety. It was signed by thirty-three other well-known entertainment and industry figures, including Dustin Hoffman, Goldie Hawn, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, and the chief of Warner Bros., Terry Semel, and drew an analogy between the mistreatment of Scientologists in Germany and the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Several weeks later, the U.S. State Department released its annual human rights report, which, in careful language, detailed German Scientologists' claims of "government-condoned and societal harassment." Though the report did not directly take the German government to task for human rights abuses, it was notably in-depth, dedicating six paragraphs to describing the various measures that had reportedly been taken against German Scientologists.
That April, Travolta met President Bill Clinton at a volunteerism summit in Philadelphia, where Travolta was stumping for Scientology's Applied