Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [195]
Because of the Church of Scientology's history of harassing and discrediting its critics and defectors, the vast majority of people who leave the church do so quietly. This book began as a magazine assignment for Rolling Stone and could not have been completed without the help of a former Scientologist whom I have promised not to name but who has served as my Virgil since the earliest days of my reporting, painstakingly explaining not only Scientology's language, beliefs, practices, and moral codes, but also the mechanisms of control by which the church suppresses or discredits the words of its former members.
I felt it was imperative to this book's credibility that it be based largely on the accounts of "quiet defectors" such as my Virgil: people who had neither sued the church nor spoken publicly about their involvement with Scientology in any way. Finding the right individuals took months. Gaining their trust took just as long. And getting them to agree to go on the record was, in many cases, an almost Herculean task.
One cost of a book like this one is the time it takes to complete. Over the years I was reporting, a number of my sources, emboldened by the Internet, decided to become more public. These include Jeff Hawkins, Marc and Claire Headley, Nancy Many, Steve Hall, Kendra Wiseman, Mark Fisher, Amy Scobee, and several others who, since I first began talking to them, have posted their stories on the Internet and talked to other journalists; Many, Hawkins, Scobee, and Marc Headley have also self-published memoirs about their years in Scientology.
Though I would be remiss in not mentioning this, I must also stress that not a single one of these people had ever spoken publicly prior to my interviewing them, nor had any of them pursued legal action against the church or written a book. Except where specifically noted, all references to these people, their stories, and their quoted words come from my own interviews and conversations with them.
Every bit of information in this book has been checked and cross-checked with multiple sources, and where I have found discrepancies, I have erred on the side of caution and toned down certain accounts whose veracity I do not feel I can comfortably prove. While this book relies almost wholly on named sources, there were a few people who, fearing retribution against themselves and their family members still in Scientology, requested I give them pseudonyms or total anonymity. Those few cases are clearly identified. I am particularly grateful to the Church of Scientology officials who spent time with me during my first year of research. This book benefitted greatly from their tremendous help.
Piecing together the complex history of Scientology is extremely difficult, and I could not have done it without the tremendous expertise and research of others, whose work I will try to acknowledge here. The early history of Scientology has been documented in two highly critical books: Russell Miller's Barefaced Messiah, which remains the best and most comprehensive biography of L. Ron Hubbard, and Jon Atack's A Piece of Blue Sky, which offers a remarkably thorough insider account of the founding and development of the Scientology movement through the 1980s. Though biased, these books are nonetheless essential reading for anyone interested in Scientology, and taken together they supply excellent insight into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard and the creation of his church.
Helen O'Brien's Dianetics in Limbo is regarded as the seminal book on the early Dianetics movement, as is Dr. Joseph Winter's A Doctor's Report on Dianetics. Paulette Cooper's The Scandal of Scientology was one of the first journalistic examinations of Scientology and is particularly helpful in describing the movement in the 1960s, as are George Malko's The Now Religion and Stephen Kent's From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam Era. For a sociological analysis