Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [180]
For people like Marty Rathbun, the promise of eternal freedom, Scientology's core doctrine, kept them hanging on during Miscavige's oppressive regime. But ultimately, even Rathbun decided he'd had enough. One afternoon in December 2004, having witnessed Miscavige physically attack Tom De Vocht during a meeting, Rathbun felt himself hit an invisible wall. If he didn't remove himself from the situation, he realized, he might kill Miscavige out of pure hate. Later that evening, Rathbun retrieved his Yamaha 650 motorcycle from the bushes where it was parked, wheeled it downhill, and waited for the back gate to open. When it did, just as a car drove through, "I gunned it and headed out down the road." That was the last he'd ever see of the base.
Within a few weeks, De Vocht was gone as well, in much the same manner. By that spring, so was Jeff Hawkins. Not one of these executives, nor those who followed, including Mike Rinder, who departed Scientology in 2007, made a move to suggest that Miscavige should be the one to leave, though both Rathbun and De Vocht later said they thought about it. "We had a tacit agreement that something needed to be done about this guy ... but you couldn't go there, because if you got caught going there, you'd be declared [an SP] forever," said Rathbun, who would never relinquish his belief in L. Ron Hubbard's technology, despite losing faith in the management of his church.
Hawkins knew that opposing Miscavige would be futile. He'd been in the Church of Scientology for thirty-eight years, had seen the movement's leadership evolve from idealistic to authoritarian to, as he saw it, Orwellian in mindset. Through it all, he'd fought to maintain his own integrity in what became a permanently hostile and intimidating environment. Finally, Hawkins accepted as pointless his hopes that things might change. What was happening at the base, said the onetime marketing chief, "was an irreversible trend. And when I realized that, I said, 'I'm out of here.'"
Throughout the Sea Org rank and file, many other members were making the same decision.
On January 10, 2005, Stefan and Tanja Castle were legally divorced. Five months later, Tanja left the trailer by the Old Gilman House that had become her home and returned to Int proper, where she was given a bed in a dormitory and a new job: helping to build sets for Golden Era Productions. The internal struggle she'd gone through for nine months, poring over LRH's teachings to see if she could find some justification for what had happened to her, was over. Stefan was an SP. Nothing else mattered. "Once the group has agreed that something is a certain way, one person can't change it on her own," she said.
It had been five years since Stefan had been separated from his wife, and less than one year since he had fled from the PAC Base, a far easier place to leave, he knew, than Int. He had tried everything he could think of to communicate with Tanja, even filing a missing person's report with the Hemet police department; nothing had worked. The detectives couldn't prove that Tanja was being held against her will. His lawyer informed him that there was no legal way to force Tanja to speak to him, unless it could be proved that she was being held captive. Desperate, Stefan contacted the church a few weeks after he fled, offering to come back to Scientology if they would let him be with Tanja. Maybe there was a place where they could go. Australia, he offered. Even the RPF, provided they could