In 1985, Lisa, eager to "expand and make more money to go up the Bridge," as she put it, quit her job at the phone company and went to work for the Slaughters as a loan officer at Atlantic Financial. There is a certain type of personality that flourishes in sales, and Lisa, charming and well mannered, "aggressive without being obnoxious," as one co-worker put it, possessed it in spades. Soon she was making roughly $70,000 per year.
Lisa had remarried; her husband, Gene Skonetski, was a Scientologist she"d met at the mission. Now they began to acquire the trappings of wealth: a new condo, new furniture, new clothes, a diamond necklace, a new Porsche, a $700 vacuum cleaner. Virtually everything was bought with Lisa"s salary, as Gene worked full-time at the Mission of the Southwest as a registrar. "You make almost nothing" in such a job, said Greg Barnes.
By 1986, this arrangement was beginning to cause problems. Gene appeared disinclined to earn a living, yet he was in charge of the couple"s finances. Then, at the end of 1987, the Dallas real estate market collapsed because of the savings and loan crisis, and the Slaughters, looking for new opportunity, decided to relocate to the San Francis...o...b..y area, where real estate values had skyrocketed. Left without a job when the Slaughters departed, Lisa was also $40,000 in debt, having "squandered a lot of my earnings," as she confessed in a church report, while borrowing substantial amounts of money to pay for her auditing.
Usually registrars would pitch a new product to people almost immediately after they"d finished a course or an auditing process; at this point they were usually in a state of euphoria and eager to do more. The registrar"s next task was to help them figure out how to pay for it. If a Scientologist didn"t have enough in her checking account or available credit on a credit card, the registrar might offer to help the member secure a loan from a fellow Scientologist. Or the member might be encouraged to borrow money from friends or family, or to borrow against a home or other property. Sandra Mercer,* a former Scientologist who worked as a registrar for many years, often rationalized this pressure by explaining to her clients-and to herself-that they would become more empowered in the end. As she explained it, "When you sit somebody down and you convince them to give over their entire life savings for the cause, you look at it this way: sometimes you have to go into debt to make money."
But some people simply couldn"t handle the financial pressure. For them, there was another option, which was joining the church staff. Even though it meant one less paying client, Scientology encouraged its members to work at the orgs, since they were so often understaffed. Virtually everyone that Mercer knew in Scientology who became a staff member had signed up at least in part for financial reasons. Lisa McPherson was no different. In February 1988, Lisa told Gene her "life"s purpose" was to work for the org full-time (the Mission of the Southwest had by this time been absorbed into the official Church of Scientology and was now called the Dallas Celebrity Centre, an org focused on the upscale and more prominent Scientologists in the area), if only to force him to take more responsibility for their bills.
But by this point, their debt to the church was so high that the church would not allow Lisa to be employed there full-time without paying at least some of it off. So Lisa agreed to work for a local dentist, also a member of the Dallas Scientology community. After finishing that job each day, she went straight to the org and labored until midnight. Lisa"s job entailed handling communications, interacting with members, and helping keep tabs on the number of paying Scientologists currently taking courses or being audited-"bodies in the shop," as they were known. She also reached out to "recover" those who, for one reason or another, may have stopped attending the church.
No one could have been more determined, said Greg Barnes. Hers was among the loudest voices at daily musters, or roll calls, which always ended with a salute to the portrait of L. Ron Hubbard and a group cheer of "Hip, hip hooray!" She was so enthusiastic that she convinced many lapsed members to resume auditing. "Lisa was a seductress," said Barnes. "She had a very pleasant smile, she could engage people in conversation, she was no dummy. And she was also very attractive-and she used that. I remember people at the org talking about her, saying, "G.o.d, what a fox.""
But working for the org meant abiding by a disciplinary system not wholly unlike that of the Sea Organization. When Lisa did well, she was given commendations for her diligence and enthusiasm. When there were errors-if she showed up late for a study session or had to miss a few evenings at the org because she had to work late at the dentist"s office-she was reported. Though Scientologists are not supposed to evaluate one another"s thoughts or motivations, something that they believe would invalidate each individual"s "truth," they are encouraged to take responsibility for one another"s moral failings. Every Scientologist, whether public or staff member, is expected to report any "out-ethics" or "off-policy" behavior in others as a security measure; "to show up bad apples," as Steve Hall put it. All Scientology ent.i.ties, from the smallest mission to the most advanced of the organizations, keep "ethics files" on every member, which includes every "chit," or rules violation, that he or she has ever committed.
At the Dallas church, as at all Scientology churches, staff members were reported for any drop-off or action that got in the way of an "up" statistic-a decrease in the number of people enrolled in Scientology courses or in the number of books sold. During Lisa"s tenure at the Dallas org, she was given chits for lateness, or "job endangerment"; for mistakes that resulted in more work for her colleagues, such as using the wrong-size envelope or folder, or failing to get a FedEx package out on time; for missing her targets by not placing enough radio and newspaper ads for the ongoing Dianetics campaign and failing to write follow-up letters to members-the latter being matters of "non-compliance," a Scientology crime. She was also the subject of several lengthy "Knowledge Reports" about her shaky finances and the tensions in her marriage. On one occasion, she was reported for having left a hot plate on overnight-a "Thing That Shouldn"t Be."
By the summer of 1988, overworked between the demands of her day job and her long shifts at the org, Lisa was exhausted. She suffered another blow when Gene, having repeatedly ignored his wife"s entreaties to help out financially, left Dallas in October and flew to Los Angeles, where he signed a billion-year contract and was absorbed into Scientology"s inner sanctum, the Sea Organization. Lisa, who was not consulted about Gene"s decision, was now saddled with the couple"s entire debt. Furious, she resolved to join the Sea Org too. But once in California, Lisa found the regimentation and strict discipline overwhelming and, desperately homesick for Dallas, soon returned home.
Leaving the Sea Organization, or any staff position, is called "blowing." It came with its own cost, an onerous one: "blown" staff members receive a "freeloader"s bill," charging them the full price for all the courses or auditing services they had taken, for free, while in the church"s employ. Therefore when Lisa returned to Dallas in the spring of 1989, she found herself $45,000 in debt, and, in accordance with church policy, she was barred from receiving any Scientology services until the money was repaid and she had gone through the appropriate "amends" process to show that she could once again be trusted.
It was a dark time, said Carol Hawk, who reconnected with Lisa during this period. Excluded from auditing, she divorced Gene and declared bankruptcy. Then, over the next six months, Lisa struggled to make reparations, working three jobs, including one at a Domino"s pizza shop. Isolated and removed from the structure of the org, she relapsed into long-discarded habits, dancing up a storm at country-western bars and even dating wogs.
But though Lisa was cut off from the services the church provided, she was not cut off from Scientology entirely. She shared an apartment with Brenda Hubert, an active member of the Dallas org, and remained in contact with several other friends and former colleagues from the church. Mixing praise with pressure, they reminded her that she was "loved" within Scientology and urged her to straighten out her finances, "get back in session," and move up the Bridge. "I am looking forward to getting your regular flows"-communications-"and seeing you have your debt fully paid off," the director of registration, Annie Morlin, wrote Lisa in June 1990. "I"ll send you a few BREs [business reply envelopes] to make it even easier."
In the summer of 1990, David and Bennetta Slaughter returned to Dallas. Looking for a new venture, they joined forces with their friend and fellow Scientologist Jeffrey Schaffner, hammering out a deal for a three-way partnership in Schaffner"s company, AMC Publishing, which would publish advertising packets and sell leads to the insurance industry.
As is typical with many Scientologist-owned companies, AMC used the management and administrative principles of L. Ron Hubbard, licensed to it by the World Inst.i.tute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE), the organization through which the Church of Scientology has, for more than thirty years, reached out directly to the high-earning professionals who fund most of its work. The stated purpose of WISE is to introduce Hubbard management theory into the non-Scientology world, though WISE often acts more as an intermediary between the church and the Scientology business community, licensing Hubbard"s "admin tech" to secular, Scientologist-owned companies for a fee-usually 10 or 15 percent of the gross revenue or money made from courses and consulting. These companies are then charged with instilling their work with key Scientology principles: using an "org board" to delegate responsibilities, managing employees by statistical a.n.a.lyses of their individual productivity, and, crucially, a.s.signing them various "conditions of existence" to improve output.
All of this is standard Scientology fare, promoted at every church and mission of Scientology in the world-and indeed, there is almost no practical difference between the technology licensed to WISE for business and that which is licensed to individual churches of Scientology to promote religion. It would be unthinkable for a Scientologist to not use Hubbard"s technology in business, just as it would be unthinkable for WISE businesses to not employ fellow Scientologists, for a key function of any WISE company is to make money: for itself and also, through donations, for the church.
With that in mind, Schaffner and the Slaughters set out to hire fellow Scientologists. Lisa McPherson, whom everyone knew to be a particularly dedicated and talented telemarketer, was an obvious and early choice. Every morning, Lisa arrived at work at 8 A.M., her hair in a ponytail, and immediately started making phone calls. Salespeople endure tremendous rejection-hang-ups, insults, even threats-but Lisa took everything in stride. She never used a script but instead chatted extemporaneously with her prospects, talking about the weather, cracking jokes, often for nearly an hour. She was astonishingly good at her job-so good, her former sales supervisor, Shirley Cage, would later reflect, that she soon began setting increasingly high targets for herself, trying to best her own quotas, which would ultimately average up to $20,000 per week.
Within a year, Lisa had righted her finances and repaid her debts to the church. Now that she was eligible to receive auditing, encouraging letters from the Dallas Org once again began to flow her way. "VWD [Very well done] on getting that debt paid off!" one staffer enthused. "Now, get into session, gal!" And Lisa did, donating $12,000 to the Dallas Organization in 1991 and then, redoubling her efforts, giving close to $22,000 to Scientology in 1992 and $27,000 in 1993.
Still, she would have had little choice in the matter. She was now one of more than a dozen Scientologist employees at AMC, where staffers cited Hubbard"s thinking on business practices such as interoffice communication and upheld his ethics code by writing up employees" "overts" and "withholds," usually at the request of a company ethics officer. Working for a WISE company can be a singularly insular experience, due to the daily indoctrination of Scientology principles; this sense of isolation is intensified by the presence of church salespeople. "When you work for one of these companies, there is constant pressure to forward Scientology"s agenda," said Sandra Mercer, who was once employed by WISE and also worked for a number of WISE-affiliated businesses. In many Scientologist companies it is not unusual to find registrars from the local organization making weekly visits to sell Scientology services to workers. Business owners see this practice as "totally acceptable," said Mercer; it provides evidence of commitment to the faith.* And it is even more "acceptable" for both business owners and their employees to become field staff members (FSMs): off-site recruiters who select services for employees, colleagues, clients, or friends, earning a commission of 10 or 15 percent. In the fractured, franchise-like structure of Scientology, the FSM is a crucial component of any operation; it is the conduit by which many new members are brought into the church and the vehicle by which existing members are kept "on course" and "in session."
Sandi Sampson, who worked with Lisa at the Southwestern Bell phone company, was acting as an FSM when she first "selected" and then "disseminated" to Lisa in 1982. For years after, Sampson was paid a commission on every course or auditing procedure she"d suggested to Lisa. By the early 1990s, Bennetta Slaughter was serving as Lisa"s FSM as well as her boss. Slaughter was also, by both women"s account, Lisa"s best friend. If this posed any conflict of interest, Lisa never let on. "I know that she felt like these people were her family," said Hawk.
By 1993, AMC Publishing had become a highly profitable company, employing more than twenty people. Almost all of them were Scientologists who had come up together in the Dallas church. They were ambitious, expansion-oriented, and eager to advance on the Bridge. That spring, Bennetta and David Slaughter floated the idea of relocating AMC from Dallas to Clearwater, Florida, Scientology"s spiritual mecca. The Tampa Bay area was booming. And "Flag," as Scientology"s operation in Clearwater was called, offered the most sophisticated spiritual counseling on earth.
With the Slaughters leading the way, AMC closed the operation in Dallas just before Christmas of 1993 and moved, with all twenty employees, to Florida. Tremendous fanfare accompanied their arrival. Bennetta and David Slaughter were known within the international Scientology world as important and rich OTs. At the Fort Harrison Hotel, Scientology"s central base of operations in Clearwater, a steak dinner was prepared for the Slaughters and their staff at the elegant Hibiscus restaurant. The group was photographed for Source, the magazine of the Flag Land Base. "This ends the most exciting month I can ever recall," Lisa McPherson wrote to her friend Robin Rhyne, a Dallas Scientologist, on January 31, 1994. "I glow constantly."
Thousands of Scientologists came to Clearwater each year, lured by the church"s depiction of Flag as the "Mecca of Technical Perfection." AMC was one of dozens of Scientologist-owned companies in Clearwater. There were Scientologist-run schools, nail salons, and cafes. Scientologists frequented the same restaurants and shops. They patronized one another"s businesses, most of which were listed in a local guide, "The Word of Mouth Directory of Honest & Reliable Businesses," which listed every Scientology-friendly business in town: plumbers, realtors, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, auto mechanics, locksmiths, and health food stores. Walking down Cleveland Street, a key downtown thoroughfare that was dominated by Scientology-owned businesses, Lisa could pick up copies of church newspapers and glance through cla.s.sified ads written in Scientology"s lingo. "I don"t know how I could truly convey what it"s like living here," Lisa wrote to one friend in Dallas. "It"s like Utopia."
Chapter 10.
Flag.
IT WAS NO ACCIDENT that Scientology picked Clearwater for its mecca. A balmy outpost on a crystalline bay, it struck the church hierarchy as "a city that could be owned," according to Larry Brennan, who helped scout the Gulf Coast for locations in 1975 when Hubbard, still sailing on the Apollo, declared his intent to move back on land.
Clearwater in the mid-1970s was a conservative, largely elderly community, deeply resistant to change. One of the city"s most ill.u.s.trious landmarks, the fifty-year-old Fort Harrison Hotel, looked like a moldy, forlorn relic of times past. In 1975, the hotel"s owners put the Fort Harrison up for sale, and that October, a company named the Southern Land Development and Leasing Corporation offered just under $3 million in cash to buy both the hotel and the similarly rundown Bank of Clearwater building, across the street.
The new owner of the buildings, it was announced, was an ec.u.menical group called the United Churches of Florida. Local reporters, curious as to how a church could have access to that much cash, made inquiries but could find no records about United Churches or Southern Land Sales and Development. If that wasn"t odd enough, security guards soon began to appear on the streets, lending the United Churches a rather military mien. Clearwater"s mayor, Gabriel Cazares, began asking questions but found few answers. "I am discomfited by the increasing visibility of security personnel, armed with billy clubs and mace, employed by the United Churches of Florida," he said in a speech made shortly after the group arrived. "I am unable to understand why this degree of security is required by a religious organization."
Reporters from two of the local newspapers, the Clearwater Sun and the St. Petersburg Times, were equally puzzled and spent the next several months digging for information about the suspicious new church. Finally, in January 1976, a St. Petersburg Times reporter named Bette Orsini began to close in on the truth: the United Churches of Florida was really a front for the controversial and wealthy Church of Scientology.* Before Orsini could break the story, church leaders, having been tipped off, decided to make the announcement themselves; they sent a representative to rea.s.sure the community that the church meant no harm and that its members, who by now were streaming into Clearwater, were law-abiding citizens who simply wanted to practice their religion in peace.
But the people of Clearwater did not take kindly to this intrusion. Most resented the clandestine way that Scientologists had arrived and wondered about the church"s true motives. These suspicions did not go away, particularly once the Church of Scientology filed lawsuits against both Cazares and the Clearwater Sun (and threatened to sue the St. Petersburg Times ), accusing them of libel and, in the case of Cazares, violation of the church"s civil rights. But what alienated the people of Clearwater most was the Scientologists" insularity: the strange shirt-and-tie formality of their clothes; the secretiveness with which they went about their business; the strange penchant they had for suing anyone who spoke negatively of them or even asked a simple question about them or their practices.
Everything the Scientologists did seemed to put them at odds with the local community. The church purchased property from local sellers but refused to pay taxes. They closed off the Fort Harrison to the public. In March 1976, a couple who had run a gift shop inside the Fort Harrison sued for loss of business after the church abruptly shut down their air conditioning, telephone, and alarm system and refused to restore the services.
Then, in the fall of 1978, word began to leak out of Washington, D.C., that Scientology had far broader plans for Clearwater than simply buying property. During the FBI raid that uncovered Operation Snow White, the feds discovered doc.u.ments that detailed the Church of Scientology"s plans to "take over" the sleepy Florida city, a project code-named Operation Goldmine. As the St. Petersburg Times reported it, "Church functionaries were directed "to fully investigate the Clearwater city and county area so we can distinguish our friends from our enemies and handle as needed.""
Church officials were directed to identify key media and political leaders and either win their allegiance or, if that failed, discredit them through a variety of covert tactics. Reporters at the St. Petersburg Times and the Clearwater Sun who had investigated Scientology were put on an "enemies list." This list also included the legendary publisher of the Times, Nelson Poynter, and the paper"s editor, Eugene Patterson; Mayor Cazares and the Clearwater chief of police were also cited, among others. Scientology"s "covert agents" had taken jobs at local newspapers, law firms, community agencies, and even the Greater Clearwater Chamber of Commerce. When Clearwater citizens became aware of this plot, they took it as a declaration of war. "People were in a frenzy against Scientology when those doc.u.ments started coming out," recalled the Washington Post writer and editor Richard Leiby, who was then a reporter for the Clearwater Sun. "They thought they had a crazy cult in their midst."
This was no small thing in 1978, the year of the Jonestown ma.s.sacre in Guyana. The story of the group"s ma.s.s suicide was horrifying: a paranoid cult leader, Jim Jones, urging his followers to drink vats of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, leaving more than nine hundred people dead, their bodies bloated by exposure to the sun. It was one of the most heavily covered stories of the 1970s, leading the news for months after the November 1978 incident. "Cult of Death" was the label that both Time and Newsweek gave to Jonestown. In Clearwater, people looked at the Scientologists and wondered what was next.
In the wake of the "Clearwater Conspiracy," as the CBS news program 60 Minutes dubbed the plot, thousands of Clearwater residents took to the streets in protest, demanding that the Church of Scientology leave town. Mayor Cazares, who"d resigned in 1978 and learned through the Snow White doc.u.ments that Scientologists intent on ruining his political career had once tried to frame him as the driver in a hit-and-run accident in Washington, D.C., called upon the federal government to be wary, warning that the Church of Scientology was a "politically fascist organization." Richard Tenney, one of the Clearwater city commissioners, spearheaded a concerned citizens group, Save Sparkling Clearwater, that held anti-Scientology rallies in public stadiums and parks. (In one particularly heated exchange, local Scientologists, infuriated by the vociferous criticism of editorialists at the Clearwater Sun, marched on the paper"s downtown headquarters dressed as n.a.z.i storm troopers, an alarming sight for the city"s elderly Jewish population.) But Scientology"s acquisition of properties in Clearwater continued. "We knew that no one, government or individual, could beat us legally and make us leave town," said Larry Brennan, who, arguing that Scientology"s services were religious in nature, had helped persuade the state of Florida to grant the Scientology organization a "consumer"s certificate of exemption," which recognized it as a religious inst.i.tution and exempted it from paying, or charging, sales tax on its courses or auditing processes. "After that, we knew we could buy whatever buildings we wanted using whatever corporate sh.e.l.l games we wanted as we were now out of the closet and legally safeguarded," Brennan said.
By 1980, the church owned four hotels and three office complexes, a.s.sessed at $8.9 million, brokering the deals in cash. About fifteen hundred Scientologists now lived in the area full-time, it was estimated, while another five hundred or so well-off Scientologists streamed into Flag annually from all over the world, spending weeks, and sometimes months, luxuriating at the Fort Harrison, with its newly renovated rooms, its lobby decked with crystal chandeliers, and its swimming pool. Church officials, hoping to combat the negative publicity caused by the Snow White revelations, reversed previous policy and threw open the doors of the Fort Harrison. With great fanfare, the church announced a downtown revitalization project and also began donating heavily to local charities. By the fall of 1980, the Clearwater Sun had to conclude that "Scientology is going to be part of Clearwater for a very long time."
Over the next decade, Scientologists continued to face significant opposition. In May 1982, the city"s new mayor, Charles LeCher, held public hearings to probe Scientology"s activities in Clearwater, which revealed shocking tales: break-ins and infiltration of government offices, local charities, and community organizations, as well as incidents of child neglect, maggot-infested food fed to staff, and an unreported hepat.i.tis outbreak at the Fort Harrison. "I"m not here to complain about what the church has done to me," said a former church executive named Scott Mayer. "I"m here to really impress upon you what you"re actually dealing with, the magnitude of what you"re dealing with."
Scientology, nonetheless, continued its public relations campaign. The church hosted more open houses at the Fort Harrison, as well as free courses and Sunday worship services. Scientology officials took out newspaper ads and began to make regular appearances on local cable and radio talk shows, presenting the typical Scientologist as "the person you work with, your friend, or the person next door." By the early 1990s, the Church of Scientology"s promotional materials openly boasted of Clearwater as a spiritual mecca, inviting members to come to "the largest community of Scientologists and OTs in the world." And thousands did. It was no surprise that Bennetta Slaughter would want to move her company there.
It was also not surprising that David Miscavige would have looked to Clearwater for inspiration when plotting the next phase of Scientology"s advancement. Fresh from his victory over the IRS, Miscavige had taken on a new, and in some ways even more ambitious, scheme: modernizing L. Ron Hubbard"s teachings, specifically those pertaining to auditor training, a project he called the Golden Age of Tech, or GAT.
This was a venture the Founder, having recognized that not all auditing was performed with the same level of care or efficiency, had initiated in the late 1970s, said the Scientologist Dan Koon, who helped design part of the Golden Age of Tech. But Miscavige, said Koon and others, seized upon the idea in the 1990s as, among other things, a money-making scheme: GAT would enforce new, rote methods that every auditor, no matter how experienced, would have to learn at his or her own expense, and then follow exactly. Ultimately, everyone in Scientology would be initiated into Miscavige"s GAT approach, a ma.s.sive retraining project that, over the coming years, would make millions of dollars for the church while overhauling Scientology"s auditing procedures. Flag, already the church"s cash cow, would be the testing ground for this new system.
Bennetta Slaughter wasted no time in Clearwater. Within a few months of her arrival, she"d ingratiated herself with the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce and begun to network with local politicians. "We called her the Queen of Clearwater," said Sandra Mercer, who"d moved to Florida from Los Angeles in 1990. "She put herself on all the political communication lines, on all the business communication lines ... on every communication line that she needed to get on. Had she not done that," Mercer added, "I don"t know that the church would have done that well in Clearwater."
David Miscavige knew Bennetta Slaughter as a prominent donor who attended yearly Scientology events in England and on the church"s exclusive cruise ship, Freewinds. Now the leader of Scientology began to hear that she was making inroads into Clearwater society. Miscavige became concerned. For all its efforts, the official Church of Scientology had very little relationship with the mayor"s office or the city commission, and it had an openly antagonistic relationship with the police. Miscavige ordered Tom De Vocht, a senior official at Flag, to find out what Slaughter was doing. "Make sure that she"s forwarding our purposes," he said.
"So I got her in to find out what she was doing, and to explain what we wanted her to be doing," said De Vocht, who now lives not far from Clearwater, in Tarpon Springs. "She was an important public figure and we wanted her to be an amba.s.sador, to introduce us to people." Slaughter, said De Vocht, agreed to act as an emissary.
Largely spurred by Slaughter"s efforts, Scientologists became increasingly civic-minded: stringing the downtown streets with Christmas lights, funding blood drives, painting murals, organizing local cleanup projects. A group Slaughter founded, the Tampa Bay Organization of Women, sponsored a carnival, dubbed Winter Wonderland, to benefit poor children, and for a few weeks each December transformed a local park into an Alpine village, complete with artificial snow, a fifty-foot Christmas tree, and Santa Claus.
This softened some of the skeptics in town. Sandra Mercer described their reaction: ""Oh, they celebrate Christmas? We didn"t know that-they"re just like us!" Of course we didn"t really celebrate Christmas, but that was part of the overall "safe pointing" strategy."
"Safe pointing" is a specific Scientology policy about how to create allies. L. Ron Hubbard frequently urged his followers to present themselves as "stable, reliable, expert [and] productive," which would then allow them to disseminate Scientology more effectively. Slaughter prosecuted this strategy with gusto.
Lisa McPherson was a vastly different sort of person. "She was just a sweetheart," Mercer recalled with affection. She"d met Lisa for the first time at a Scientology event in early 1994. "She was not at all the intense person that Bennetta was." But Lisa was the top producer at AMC, after Slaughter herself. It was Lisa"s steady productivity that allowed Slaughter to busy herself in town. "In Scientology, Lisa was what we"d call a "working installation,"" Mercer explained. "She was a workhorse. And Bennetta worked her and used her."
For ten years since she"d become a Scientologist, Lisa McPherson"s goal had been to go Clear. But a variety of obstacles, including her previous lack of financial resources, always stood in the way. Now, with a newly tax exempt church encouraging members to "move up the Bridge even faster" by claiming their Scientology courses and auditing as tax-exempt donations, Lisa began climbing the Bridge in earnest. In 1993, she earned more than $136,000 at AMC and donated $57,000 to the church, claiming a $17,000 refund on her taxes for "charitable deductions"-more than four times the average for taxpayers in her income bracket, the St. Petersburg Times would later note. Lisa also received a bill of $75,000 for auditing fees.* Though the money she spent on Scientology still claimed most of her earnings, Lisa never spoke of it as a financial sacrifice.
Scientology sells itself as a self-betterment program-a route to eternal happiness. But its processes target a member"s weaknesses. And, as Mercer explained, there is always a weakness that can be exploited. "You might think you"ve solved your big problem, but wait-your boyfriend broke up with you, or your boss is giving you a hard time, or something else. There is always something that is ruining your life and needs fixing." It is this cycle of problemrealizationcurenew problem that ultimately melds a person with Scientology"s collective mindset. "It"s an ongoing process," Mercer said. "After a while, your self-esteem is so low, you think everything is a problem."
For Lisa, the problem was often men. She had suffered a string of failed romances, and in the spring of 1995 had broken up with a man named Kurt Paine, whom she"d once planned to marry. Between her sadness and work pressures, she began to appear "downstat." Her sales plummeted, and her commissions, once averaging between $4,000 and $6,000 every two weeks, now sank to just $600 or $700. With her statistics in the tank, Lisa was given an ethics handling at work and was also being audited at church. She told her auditor that it was "bulls.h.i.t" and also resented the increasing pressure to put in more volunteer hours on projects like Winter Wonderland. Tensions with Bennetta Slaughter began to boil over. In his notes, her auditor wrote that Lisa was "fixated on Bennetta."
"Bennetta was totally focused on getting Lisa to do what she wanted, all the time," said Michael Pattinson, a Scientologist who was working in Clearwater that spring, overseeing the design of the Slaughters" new house. "She was the boss, the money-maker, the FSM, and now she was the ethics officer as well-she had a vested interest in getting Lisa to make more money for the company and for Scientology, and for her." At one point, Pattinson recalled, "she said, "I"d much rather go back to Dallas and just pursue my own life and my own career, and just be myself." So I said, "Listen: you should follow your own purposes in life and not someone else"s purposes.""
But Lisa had lost track of her own purposes. In her auditing sessions, she complained that she was unable to "find" herself. She was despondent, racked with guilt, and confused-Scientology, in which Lisa had so fervently believed, had stopped working. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it I feel so desperate," she told her auditor. "[I] don"t want to do this anymore."
As the former Scientology official Jesse Prince, who examined Lisa"s auditing records in 1998, points out, telling your auditor you don"t want auditing or that it is not working is a crime in Scientology. Once a person makes these a.s.sertions, the director of processing, who manages all auditing for the church, "retrieves" the person from his or her usual auditor and places the person in an "auditing repair program." This program, says Prince, "is designed to repair past auditing mistakes. Lisa McPherson had several of these programs, yet they did not work."
Instead, the new program drove Lisa deeper into despair. Over and over, she spoke of leaving Scientology-"blowing," in the group"s parlance; she also told her auditor that she"d been contemplating suicide. Scientologists believe very strongly that a person is fully responsible for their own condition in life, good or bad. Lisa repeatedly searched for reasons she had failed to get better. She saw herself as a "potential trouble source" to Bennetta, unhappy at work, wanting to leave. But she felt incapable of walking away. Her anger turned to despondency and finally to helplessness. "Nothing matters anymore," she told her auditor. "I just want to be left alone."
Depressed and exhausted, Lisa took a leave of absence from AMC and in late June 1995 checked into the Fort Harrison to begin an intensive auditing program known as the Introspection Rundown, which Hubbard designed to help members who were having emotional difficulties. If done correctly, the person should ultimately readjust his or her mentality and "extrovert," or focus attention less on the self and more on others, and the goals of the larger group. "The rundown is very simple and its results are magical in effectiveness," Hubbard had maintained.
At the hotel, Lisa was a.s.signed a roommate named Susan Schnurrenberger, a Sea Org member who worked in the base"s medical office. Schnurrenberger, who had a nursing background, was charged with watching over Lisa to make sure she ate, slept, and was "sessionable"-able to receive auditing. Schnurrenberger was also supposed to prevent Lisa from hurting herself, as she had repeatedly threatened suicide. During the first few weeks, Lisa"s moods roller-coastered from upbeat and "gleaming bright," as one staff member wrote in a memo, to dark and depressive. She felt as if she had an "enemy" inside of her. "Susan," she told Schnurrenberger one night, "I think I"m going crazy."
Late that summer, however, she seemed to emerge from her confusion. The past few months had been a "blank," she wrote to Robin Rhyne on September 2, 1995, adding that she was finally out of the woods and feeling more hopeful. She was still at the Fort Harrison and being audited every day. "You will never believe the level of care and service I"ve received at Flag. I"m ready to go on tour and tell the world how anything CAN BE HANDLED!" she wrote.
Finally, on September 7, 1995, Lisa achieved her longtime goal and went Clear. The struggle, as she later described it, had been like "a gopher being pulled through a garden hose," but she attributed her success to the support of her friends "and of course LRH." "It has been ... worth every single thing I"ve had to go through ... I am so full of life I am overwhelmed at the joy of it all!" she wrote. "Now, I understand!" she added, underlining the word understand five times. "WOW!"
That evening, Lisa stood in front of an audience of fellow Scientologists at the Fort Harrison, where, framed certificate in hand, she announced her achievement. She looked thin; her short-sleeved black-and-white-striped dress hung loose on her frame. Her face, now framed by a short haircut, looked drawn. Yet her voice was strong. "Being Clear," she said, "is more exciting than anything I"ve ever experienced."
But Lisa"s glow wore off quickly. She returned to AMC but found it hard to regain her momentum, and by October, her statistics had begun to dip once again. She worked harder, putting in long hours and pushing herself, even taking on the role of chief fundraiser for Winter Wonderland; yet sometimes she failed to raise money, a situation, she decided, that put her in a condition of "treason" to AMC. She now endured even more rigorous ethics handlings, writing painstaking confessions in which she blamed herself for her "case"-her psychological issues.
The confessions were exhausting. And yet, in letters to her friend Robin, she tried to be upbeat about the process, talking about her "cognitions" and "gains." Lisa expressed the same enthusiasm during a phone call she made to her friend Carol Hawk. "The conversation was a little different than our usual talks," Hawk recalled. "Lisa and I [generally] talked about things that were going on in our lives. She usually talked about Scientology only in terms of how she might respond to a particular situation or person and rarely pushed regarding the "technology" of Scientology." But during this conversation, Hawk said, "she made a little speech about how "great the tech was" and how every day she woke up "wonderfully happy and ready to play." She "had never experienced anything like it," and "couldn"t say enough good about the tech" ... I remember thinking she was a commercial for Scientology."
That was the last time Hawk talked to Lisa. Not long after, Lisa called another childhood friend, Kellie Davis, and apologized for having been out of touch for so many years. Davis had the impression that Lisa was going to leave Scientology. "She said she couldn"t get into it over the phone but she said she had a lot to talk about,"" Davis later told the Tampa Tribune. "She said she would explain when she got here."" Lisa told Davis that she was hoping to return to Dallas for Thanksgiving, but one way or another, she would be home, possibly for good, by Christmas. "She had made the decision to get out and come back here and she seemed happy," Davis said.
But on the phone with her mother a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Lisa sounded ragged. She was having trouble at work, she told Fannie, and cried. "Mother, I"ve let my group down," she said. "And that was the last time I talked to her," said Fannie.
The ethics handling that Lisa was receiving during this time was the very same method that had driven her to a breakdown just a few months before. "It was therefore extremely foreseeable," as Ken Dandar, an attorney for the McPherson family, later a.s.serted, "that given Lisa McPherson"s prior experience of being psychotic in June of 1995, coupled with her troubles in taking Scientology instruction, she would very likely experience another psychotic episode."
And she did. On November 15, 1995, Lisa was sent to a trade show in Orlando with several AMC colleagues. She packed numerous books by Hubbard that she hoped would help her with her job. But even before they left, Brenda Hubert, who was managing AMC"s role in the trade show, found Lisa to be unusually disorganized. "She was very frantic," Hubert wrote in a subsequent memo to church officials. "She talked constantly and couldn"t recall what she had just said." When they got to the convention, she began "disseminating" to total strangers, accosting a waiter at a local cafe and then another one later that night at the hotel restaurant, demanding that they read Dianetics-right that minute.
By the second day of the conference, Lisa had become more desperate. That night, Hubert awoke at 3 A.M. to find Lisa pinned on top of her. She was sobbing hysterically. "Get up!" Lisa said. "There"s something going on on this planet that you don"t know!"
Hubert tried to calm her, but it was useless. Lisa seemed disoriented. She was ranting, saying, "I"m afraid I"m going to flip out again like I did before." The next day, Lisa was sent back to Clearwater under Brenda Hubert"s care.
At Bennetta Slaughter"s request, Hubert wrote a lengthy memo detailing what had happened during the trade show. In this letter, Hubert noted that Lisa"s ethics officer, Katie Chamberlain, had instructed her to rigorously supervise Lisa. "I was told that she was just pretending to be incapable and need directions and orders and that I should not grant that any life or credence." Her own observations, Hubert said, "did not align with what I was told."
And yet, Hubert said she "did what I was told to do. I did try to impinge upon her by yelling at her a few times; I did tell her with force to knock it off; I did tell her that she was at risk of losing her job if she didn"t straighten up ... I am afraid that I might have made this whole thing worse or further upset her and that was not what I wanted to have happen." Then she provided her phone numbers as a contact. "I love Lisa and want to see this get handled," she said. "Please do everything you can for her."
Hubert"s concern was genuine. Despite her worry, however, she didn"t alert a doctor or take Lisa to the hospital. Instead, she simply typed the letter and delivered it to the church, where she instructed an administrative aide to put the doc.u.ment in Lisa"s preclear folder. Whether anyone read her note, Hubert never knew.
The next morning, back in Clearwater, Lisa seemed better. She spent the morning painting sets for Winter Wonderland with her ethics officer Katie Chamberlain, Bennetta Slaughter, and other volunteers at a downtown warehouse. But soon she began to appear "mentally tired [and] stressed," said Chamberlain, and by lunchtime she"d gone home to take a nap. Just before dusk, Lisa got back into her red Jeep Cherokee and headed toward the center of Clearwater. It was rush hour, and the line of cars was moving slower than usual, the result of a motorcycle accident at the corner of South Fort Harrison and Bellevue Boulevards, which had forced traffic into a single lane. As she approached the intersection, Lisa, perhaps distracted by the accident, rear-ended a boat that was fastened to the back of a pickup truck, which had stopped in front of her. "It was just a b.u.mp. It was nothing serious," recalled a paramedic named Bonnie Portolano.
Portolano, who had been on the scene of a motorcycle crash, saw the accident and approached the Jeep; in the driver"s seat, a pretty young woman, dressed in a loose-fitting white shirt, looked up at her. "I"m ... I"m sorry," Lisa said.
"Are you okay?"
"I"m fine," she replied, her voice shaking.
The paramedic checked her for sc.r.a.pes and bruises. "You"re sure you didn"t hurt yourself?"
"No," Lisa said. "I did not."
There was something off about the woman, Portolano thought. She seemed dazed and her voice was strangely formal, almost programmed. When she was asked a question, she answered with short yes and no answers and, most unnervingly, stared fixedly at Portolano and her partner while doing so. "Can you tell me where you live?" Portolano asked. Lisa couldn"t recall. "I could take you there," she offered, "but I don"t know what [my address] is."
Portolano didn"t know what to do. "I attributed all of this to maybe shock," she said. It was not unusual for victims of even minor collisions to be disoriented immediately afterward. Physically, Lisa didn"t have a scratch and a.s.sured the paramedics that she didn"t need medical treatment. Portolano gave Lisa a release form to sign, then she and her partner, Mark Fabyanic, walked back to their ambulance. They were just about to leave the scene when Fabyanic, the driver, looked in his side-view mirror. "Bonnie, she"s taking off her clothes," he said.
"No, she"s not."
"I"m not lying."
Lisa walked down the middle of the street, past the ambulance, naked. Portolano jumped out. "Lisa, what are you doing? Why did you take off your clothes?"
Lisa turned. "Well, you see, n.o.body knows this but I"m an OT," she said. "I don"t need a body."
Portolano didn"t know what Lisa was talking about. Grabbing her arm, she managed to escort Lisa to the ambulance, where she laid her on a stretcher and covered her with a blanket. "Why did you take off your clothes?" Portolano asked again.
Lisa gave the paramedic a searing look. "I wanted people to think I was crazy because I need help," she said. "I just need someone to talk to." Then she closed her eyes. "I"m so tired," Lisa said in a dull monotone. "I need help."
The paramedics took Lisa to the nearby Morton Plant Hospital emergency room. There, she struck the staff as lucid but resistant to questions, opening her eyes only on command. "She was being very robotic," recalled Kimberly Brennan, one of the nurses on call. Brennan called Dr. Flynn Lovett, the emergency physician on call, who felt strongly that Lisa should be admitted for a psychiatric evaluation and phoned the hospital"s mental health unit.
It was just around then, Brennan recalled, that an official from the Church of Scientology showed up. It was perplexing because to Brennan"s knowledge, Lisa hadn"t called anyone, nor had anyone else phoned the church. Moments later, another church official walked into the emergency room, and then a third. With great agitation they explained to the hospital staff that any form of psychiatry was against the Scientology religion and that Lisa would be better off in the church"s care. "They were very upset that we were going to have an evaluation done," Brennan later told the police. "And basically, they did not leave her bedside."
Joe Price, a psychiatric nurse who"d been called to examine Lisa, didn"t know what to make of this. "I"ve never had someone ... just straight out tell you that they don"t believe in psychiatry and that they really don"t want your help or need your help," he said. One Church of Scientology official, a well-dressed man in a silk tie and tailored suit, handed Price a brochure. "The basis of the brochure," Price recalled, was that "all psychiatrists will either rape or s.e.xually intimidate or molest their female patients."
Price a.s.sured the officials that he wasn"t a psychiatrist or psychologist, but a nurse who simply wanted to ask Lisa some questions. The Scientologists allowed this, though they remained in the room. He introduced himself to Lisa and then asked if she wanted the Scientologists to leave. "I remember her saying that she didn"t mind if they stayed at her side," he said. "And so they did and I completed my a.s.sessment."
Lisa was slow to answer Price"s questions and exhibited other odd behavior, such as crossing her eyes, which she told him helped her to concentrate. She spoke calmly, but Price had a "gut feeling" that she wasn"t speaking freely. The Scientologists "did not interrupt me while I was questioning her [but] I did notice and I felt that she was intimidated by their presence. So after I initially interviewed her, I went and spoke to Dr. Lovett and we asked them [if they would] mind if I talked to her alone."
The officials hesitated but ultimately agreed and walked a few feet away, around a corner. Price recalled, "I said, "Lisa, do you need help? Do you want our help?" She said no ... She denied to me that anything was wrong." Price asked her if she was being held captive, or if she was being intimidated by anyone from the church. Again, Lisa said no.
The Florida Mental Health Act, also known as the "Baker Act," stipulates that patients can be involuntarily committed to a hospital only if they pose a danger to themselves or others, or in other ways exhibit obvious signs of mental illness. Lisa McPherson, Price said, did not meet these criteria. "She was alert and oriented times three. She was able to think abstractly ... She wasn"t suicidal ... she wasn"t homicidal. Was there any psychosis going on at the time-by that I mean, was she out of touch with reality? I don"t think so." Granted, her behavior was strange, but he could find no reason to commit her. The Scientologists a.s.sured Price that Lisa wouldn"t harm herself. "I want to go home with my friends from the congregation," Lisa said, in a pa.s.sive voice.
Reluctantly the hospital agreed. At 8:40 that evening, less than two hours after being admitted, Lisa McPherson checked herself out of Morton Plant Hospital "against medical advice," and left with six Scientology officials, three at each arm. Standing by the door to the emergency room, Nurse Price watched them go. "My impression was ... "My G.o.d, this lady"s a prisoner,"" he said.
Chapter 11.