Inside Scientology (32 page)

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 scrapes 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 assured 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, nobody 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 sexually intimidate or molest their female patients."

Price assured 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 assessment."

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 assured Price that Lisa wouldn't harm herself. "I want to go home with my friends from the congregation," Lisa said, in a passive 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 God, this lady's a prisoner,'" he said.

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L. Ron Hubbard in 1970,
"is the overt or covert but always complex and continuous determination to harm or destroy. Possibly the only frightening thing about it," he added, "is the cleverness with which it can be hidden." This condition, Hubbard believed, afflicted 15 to 20 percent of the human race, though he maintained that the vast majority of the insane had no "reality" on how irrational they might be, nor did anyone else.

The last, and most obvious, stage of insanity, the "psychotic break," according to Hubbard, was present only in someone who has become what Hubbard called a "PTS Type III," or simply Type Three.
^*
This would be an individual who "sometimes has ghosts about him or demons,"
a person whom even the Founder believed was most often found in mental institutions. That such a person might be found in Scientology was, by the church's own doctrine, taboo. The purpose of Scientology, as Hubbard wrote, was to "make the able more able," not to treat the mentally ill. He did not consider psychosis to be a field of practice in Scientology, he wrote, "and Scientology was not researched or designed as a cure for psychosis or 'substitute for psychiatry.'"

And yet, from as far back as 1950, when Dr. Joseph Winter first noticed that clients at the Elizabeth Foundation were suffering breakdowns as a result of their auditing, the phenomenon of Scientologists "going Type Three" was far from uncommon. So much was this the case, in fact, that in June 1971, Hubbard wrote a confidential memo to his senior officials advising them how to handle the prospect of a member becoming emotionally unstable. "Policy is that we assign any case or upset in Scientology to past damage and interference with the person by medicine or psychiatry,"
he wrote. "They were sent to us after medicine or psychiatry had already destroyed them. We cannot be blamed for psychiatric or medical failures."

Three years later, the church unveiled the Introspection Rundown, which Hubbard, with typical brio, announced as a "cure" for what he called the last "unsolvable" mental condition, the psychotic break. "I have made a technical breakthrough which possibly ranks with the major discoveries of the Twentieth Century,"
he proclaimed in a bulletin dated November 24, 1973. "THIS MEANS THE LAST REASON TO HAVE PSYCHIATRY AROUND IS GONE."

The Introspection Rundown began with providing a patient with a regimen of peace and quiet. This, Hubbard was clear to point out, was not a cure itself, but a temporary measure aimed at calming an individual to a point where he or she could receive the rundown—which, Hubbard believed, would then deliver the cure. To this end, he instructed his followers to "isolate the person wholly with all attendants
completely
muzzled (no speech),"
which would, he said, "destimulate and ... protect them and others from possible damage."
Vitamins and minerals, such as B complex and calcium magnesium compound (known as "Cal Mag"), were to be administered "to build the person up."
If needed, medical care "of a very unbrutal nature,"
such as intravenous feedings or tranquilizers, might also be administered. Then, once the initial upset had subsided, a person could begin auditing in short sessions, though between the sessions the muzzling would still be in effect. The Founder was very proud of his creation. "You have in your hands the tool to take over mental therapy in full,"
he said. "Do it flawlessly and we all win."

Over the next twenty years, numerous Scientologists suffered psychotic breaks and were handled in accordance with Hubbard's policies. "I'd heard about people going Type Three for years," recalled Jeff Hawkins, who said that in the Sea Org, these people were usually sent away, "presumably to family," though not always. "I remember there was one lady who was sent to a ranch Scientology owned near Santa Clarita, and spent probably a year in isolation with one or two other people. Other people who went crazy were sent to a ranch near the Int Base." Hawkins didn't know what happened to these people. "All you knew was they flipped out somehow."

Scientologists knew better than to ask what happened to a member who went Type Three, which was not to say that church insiders were unaware of how psychotic breaks were handled. "Without question, most seasoned Sea Org members are aware of what is done to a person when someone is declared PTS Type Three," said Nancy Many, who was based in Clearwater in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though she never took part in an Introspection Rundown, she was well aware when they were occurring, as she often saw guards posted outside various hotel rooms at the Fort Harrison. "I'd ask them why they were there and they'd tell me that a member had just gone Type Three and needed to be watched," she said. As a church official in charge of external relations, "I'd see Telexes come in from other organizations all the time, reporting that someone had gone Type Three and needed to be 'fixed.'"

What that meant, she understood, was very specific, not only for the person suffering the breakdown but also for the organization. "The worst thing that could happen would be that someone would lose it and cause a lot of work for staffers, which would cause the organization to lose money," she said. "You wanted to get these people isolated and away from the org and its income lines as fast as you could."

In October 1989, one Scientologist, thirty-one-year-old Marianne Coenan, suffered a breakdown and was confined in a ranch house in a well-do-to section of Pomona, California, by her husband and family, who were all church members. Two months later, the police received a tip and went to the house, where they found Coenan locked in a sparsely furnished room, behind a bolted door "into which a small, square opening was cut and steel bars had been inserted"
as an observation grate, according to one report in the
Los Angeles Times.
Authorities described her as "incoherent," with "bruises and scratches on her legs, wrists, and neck." Scientology material was found in the house, including information about the Introspection Rundown. A church spokesman insisted that Coenan's treatment "was not a church matter ... nor did the church take any stand with relationship to her treatment."

With Lisa McPherson it would be different. That a newly minted Clear, someone "in control of their own mind" by Scientology's own definition, could suffer what by all appearances seemed like a total mental breakdown on a public street in Clearwater, the heart of Scientology's spiritual empire, was not only a situation that needed "fixing" but also a potential public relations nightmare for the church, and particularly for the Flag Land Base, the highest-grossing organization in Scientology. "This is not what the members pay $100,000 or more to get," said Many. "There are many, many Scientologists who have moved to Clearwater to advance on the Bridge and are regularly paying big money to Flag. You would never want them knowing that one of these high-ranking people just went crazy."

But there was also another reason McPherson's breakdown caused such a fuss: according to several former church officials, it had been Scientology's leader, David Miscavige, who'd declared Lisa McPherson Clear to begin with.

For the better part of 1995, Miscavige was in Clearwater, where he was working on his project to "remake the face of Flag," as one former official put it, through the Golden Age of Tech. To do this, he involved himself in every facet of the base's daily operations, issuing streams of orders that staff were expected to follow exactly, and right away. "In the Sea Org, if you get an order from Dave Miscavige, everything else in your entire life stops until that order is complied with and he accepts it as done," Marc Headley, a former Sea Org member, told me in an interview. Headley was based at Scientology's Golden Era Productions studio on the Int Base but was sent to Flag in 1995 to oversee the installation of new audiovisual systems. As he recalled, Miscavige put "relentless pressure on the Florida staff to crank as many people through Flag as possible." The ultimate result was that the Clearwater organization grossed more than $1 million per week.