The news broke a few days ago that two long time PI’s for the Church of Scientology are suing the group after the church reneged on their lifetime commitment of employment.  C’mon guys, these former L.A. cops are mere wogs.  Their lifetimes are surely a drop in the bucket compared to the billion year commitment you get from all your Sea Org staff.

Attorneys for Paul Marrick and Greg Arnold said the church owes their clients for unpaid work, including casing the neighborhood of Ingleside on the Bay resident Mark “Marty” Rathbun, a former high-ranking church official.

Karin Pouw, a spokeswoman for the church based in California, said she had no comment because church attorneys had not had a chance to review the most recent lawsuit filing, received by the court clerk Thursday. It was filed in basic form, with few details, in July.

Rathbun defected from the church in 2004 and settled in the small bayside community where he began counseling other defectors, writing a blog criticizing the church, and fostering a movement of Scientologists who adhere to the philosophies of church founder L. Ron Hubbard but reject the practices of the organized church and its leadership.

For Ray Jeffrey, one of the attorneys for Marrick and Arnold, this is not his first brush with the church. He represented Debbie Cook, another former high-ranking church official who sent ripples through Scientology circles in a New Year’s Eve email to thousands of Scientologists criticizing aggressive fundraising practices and calling for changes.

The church sued her in San Antonio, where she lives. Jeffrey helped negotiate a settlement in which Cook gave up no money but agreed never to speak out against the church. Yet the settlement came only after a day of embarrassing court testimony from Cook, reported by the Tampa Bay Times, in which she detailed how church workers essentially were imprisoned and beaten.Jeffrey said Marrick, 52, of Colorado, and Arnold, 53, of California, approached him because of his work on the Cook case and the difficulty explaining the complexities of the inner workings of the church.

“If you go try to tell a lawyer about this who has no knowledge of it, it could take them months just to get the lay of the land,” Jeffrey said.

He is working with three other attorneys, including Tom Harrison, of Corpus Christi.

Joe Childs and Tom Tobin of the Tampa Bay Times reported on the lawsuit and have now done a lengthy interview with Marrick and Arnold who were hired in 1988 to spy on Pat Broeker, the man L. Ron Hubbard apparently chose as his successor to run Scientology.  Marrick and Arnold spent nearly the next 25 years following Broeker everywhere he went.

Church officials painted Broeker as an errand boy for the late Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. They said he had made off with $1.8 million and a cache of critically important Hubbard records.

Follow Broeker, they said. Watch him every minute. Report back frequently.

The private eyes did. Beginning in 1988 and continuing for a quarter of a century, Paul Marrick and Greg Arnold tracked Broeker from a California apartment to a cowboy town in Wyoming and even to the Czech Republic.

They spied on his girlfriends, rifled through his garbage and listened to his phone calls.

After 14 months, high-ranking church leader Marty Rathbun told Marrick and Arnold they had performed so well, the church would have work for them for the rest of their careers.

They were “part of the family,” Rathbun told them.

The church started paying them a lump sum: $32,000 a month.

“We thought, ‘Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal,’ ” said Marrick.

And the checks kept coming until this summer, when the church stopped paying.

Now, Marrick and Arnold are suing Scientology, claiming the church and its leader David Miscavige violated their long-ago verbal deal.

In a three-hour interview with the Tampa Bay Times in the office of their Texas lawyer, Ray Jeffrey, the investigators shared details of their top-secret work. They told a rollicking tale of espionage and described the expense to which Scientology went to gather intelligence on real and perceived enemies.

The investigators’ lawyer says the church paid them between $10 million and $12 million. In addition to Broeker, they followed several other church targets, including a drug company executive who now is governor of Indiana — Mitch Daniels.

In addition to the print story, segments of Tobin and Childs’ video interview have been posted on the Tampa Bay Times website.  In the video, the men explain that code names were used for all the parties involved.  David Miscavige was named the Duke, which seemed to please him mightily.

This looks to be a case that will quickly settle but the cat is now out of the bag.  After 25 years of following Broeker, the PI’s concluded he was a nice guy with nothing to hide and a far cry from how the Duke had him portrayed.  25 years of hounding a man because the Duke was worried about his throne.

If only someone could come up with a science of the mind that could help the poor, little Duke.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

I took a break from editing in the past couple weeks to head up to L.A. and do a couple more interviews for my new documentary, Knowledge Report.  Tory Christman has been my friend since she left Scientology.  She sat down with me to talk about her experiences both inside the organization and what actions they have taken against her since she publicly departed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Jason Beghe made a big splash on the net four years ago when we sat down to do his first interview about Scientology.  We felt it was about time to update his story both for the film and for another revealing long form interview for the net.  Here’s a teaser of what’s in store:

Click here to view the embedded video.

By the way, the latest fundraising campaign for my film ends in a little more than a day.  If you’d like to contribute or just spread the word, click here.

When Tony Ortega recently announced he was leaving his position as Editor of the Village Voice to write a book about Scientology, it was at once exciting and sad because no one in the media understands Scientology as well as Tony.  His book will likely become the go-to resource for anyone interested in finding out about Scientology but leaving the Voice meant his almost daily breaking of stories big and small about the group might come to an end.  Happily he has opened up shop at a new blog and the torrent of information continues to spill out.

Already he’s given his take on The Master, reported on a celebrity Scientologist’s bizarre murder/suicide and continued his long running series of Sunday Funnies.  And he’s crept out of his bunker long enough to visit Marty Rathbun in Texas and meet with some Scientology PI’s who are spilling the beans on their 25 year long investigation of the man Hubbard wanted to take over the Church of Scientology.

David Miscavige likely doesn’t know who to slap first.  There are so many fires to put out and so few who are still willing to call themselves Loyal Officers.

Welcome back, Tony, from one Bunker to another.

I’ve been reading Kate Bornstein’s new book and I highly recommend it.  It is tremendously entertaining and often laugh out loud funny.   Her transgender journey from Al Borstein to Kate Bornstein is fascinating enough but the trip detours through Scientology and the Sea Org and gives us a unique perspective of what it was like to be on the High Seas with L. Ron Hubbard.  Tony Ortega did a cover story on Kate back in May for the Village Voice.

There have also been quite a few books published recently by former church members.Nancy Many, in My Billion Year Contract (2009), wrote about the mental anguish she experienced after splitting away from the church she had served for decades. In Abuse at the Top (2010), former high-ranking church executive Amy Scobee wrote that she’d been raped as a teenager by a senior executive, but the crime had been covered up. Jefferson Hawkins had one of the most unique careers in Scientology—he marketed church founder L. Ron Hubbard‘s essential text, Dianetics, as the church experienced its greatest expansion in the 1980s. His account of becoming the man who sold Scientology to the world, Counterfeit Dreams (2010), is a fascinating tale. And perhaps the most dramatic of the bunch, Marc Headley‘s escape narrative, Blown for Good (2009), turns his years working at Scientology’s secretive desert international headquarters in California into a cinematic yarn.

I’ve read them all, interviewed the authors, and talked to many other former members about their lives in the church as I’ve covered Scientology closely on the Voice‘s news blog.

And that’s why I can say with some confidence that none of these recent narratives captures and conveys the hardcore Scientology experience quite like Bornstein’s book.

Kate describes, perhaps better than anyone has before, what it was like to become a dedicated Sea Org member during Scientology’s more freewheeling heyday.

Al Bornstein joined Scientology in 1970, sailed the ship Apollo with L. Ron Hubbard in 1971 and 1972, and was driven out and declared a “suppressive person”—Scientology’s version of excommunication—in 1982. By then, his wife, Molly, whom he had met in the church, had left him and taken their daughter, Jessica, with her. Molly, Jessica, and Jessica’s son and daughter are all still members of Scientology and are required by the church’s policy to have no contact with any “SP,” including Bornstein.

And that’s why Kate has never met her own grandchildren.

In the early chapters of the book, as Kate describes growing up as Al in Interlaken, New Jersey, and trying to live up to the masculine expectations of her father, Paul Bornstein, she gradually introduces concepts about Scientology and makes Hubbard a sort of parallel figure to Paul who is lurking in the background (both manly, pudgy father figures).

Kate’s relationship to both was consuming and complex. Dad, for example, wanted a sports-minded, skirt-chasing son and was alarmed enough about young Al’s virginity that he paid a prostitute to do the honors. (Al balked and ended up talking to the girl instead.)

In college, Al fell hard for JoBeth Williams, but he slept around a lot (“I fell in love with every woman I had sex with”) and was also cruising guys so that he could feel like a girl. Having discovered tranny porn, Al increasingly nurtured his desire to look feminine and feel pretty.

By the time Al stumbled upon Scientology—at a mission in Denver following a soul-searching mountain-climbing excursion that almost ended in disaster—he’d been questioning his own ideas about men, women, boys, and girls for years.

At the Denver mission, he met a woman named Molly who started to help him understand the basic concepts of the religion: L. Ron Hubbard had discovered that we are immortal beings called thetans and that we have lived countless times before in other bodies—male and female—spanning a past that is trillions of years old. Our minds are cluttered with obscuring material—the result of past traumas—and only through Hubbard’s mind-clearing process called “auditing” could the thetan begin to see its true situation.

It was a lot to absorb, but Al was struck hard by one thing in particular about Hubbard’s scientific-sounding ideas.

“Thetans have no gender. Can you imagine a more appealing theology for someone like me?” Kate asks.

Read Tony Ortega’s full story and then grab yourself a copy of Kate’s book.

INSTANT UPDATE:

Almost immediately after posting this, I saw over at Tony Ortega’s blog that Kate is battling lung cancer.  She has an update on her condition over at her blog and, as far as cancer news goes, this seems to be something the doctor’s think they can handle.  Kate’s partner is making a difference in the fight, too.

The wonderful news is that the docs found it by accident, and the tumor (singular) is very very early in it’s development. The cancer is deeply embedded in the upper lobe of my right lung. That means that all the doctors have to do is take out the upper lobe of my right lung (Your left lung has two lobes, your right lung has three. Did you know that? I didn’t, not before this.) Assuming they’re right, I won’t be needing any chemo or radiation. They’ll just take out the chunk of lung that has the tumor, along with the lymph nodes that are hooked up to my right lung, et voila! Healthy Auntie. And the funnest part of this news? The surgeon is gonna use ROBOTS to do the surgery!! How cool is that?

I’ve been through batteries of tests over the last couple of weeks. They show that my lungs are super strong, and my heart’s in great shape. So, I’ve got a green light for surgery. The date is set for October 25th—with 3 to 5 days recovery in the hospital afterwards. Given that my immune system is already compromised by my CLL (chronic lymphatic leukemia), it’ll most likely be the full five days, and I’ll be out in time for Halloween! Then, it’ll be another couple of weeks recovering at home, and I’ll be up and around and back to pro wrestling. I’ve always wanted to give pro wrestling a try.

Read her full health report over at her blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There have been some incredible books released on Scientology in the last few years but this one looks like it has the most potential to reveal new insights into the current leadership of the organization while stirring up massive media interest.  The niece of David Miscavige, Jenna Miscavige Hill, will be sharing her experiences inside Scientology and the Sea Org and drawing great attention to the practice of Disconnection.  The Daily Mail has some details:

Jenna Miscavige Hill, 28, daughter of David’s older brother Ron, has been a frequent critic of the Church of Scientology since publicly breaking with it in 2005.

In ‘Beyond Belief: My Secret Life inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape’, she will reveal ‘strange and disturbing’ details about growing up in the church and will provide a firsthand account of Scientology’s ‘upper ranks’, its publishers William Morrow say.

In 2000, when she was 16 years old, Ms Miscavige’s parents left Scientology, disillusioned with its practices.

In the five years that followed, she has claimed that – because of the church’s policy of ‘disconnection’ with relatives and friends who do not support the cult – all letters between them were intercepted and she was not allowed to answer the telephone for over a year.

‘If you flunked your uniform inspection, sometimes if you were late . . . you would be dumped with a five-gallon bucket of ice water,’ she told investigative journalist Philip Recchia in 2008.

‘We were also required to write down all transgressions . . . similar to a sin in the Catholic religion.

‘After writing them all down, we would receive a meter check on the Electropsychometer to make sure we weren’t hiding anything, and you would have to keep writing until you came up clean. This is from the age of 5 until I was 12.’

Read the full Daily Mail article here, and visit the site Jenna put together with Astra Woodcraft and Kendra Wiseman for Ex-Scientology Kids.