by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I switched to Arts & Entertainment for the second
episode in actress and former Scientologist Leah Remini’s exposé of the church,
this time profiling Mike Rinder, the church’s former enforcer of its “fair
game” policy. The “fair game” policy was created by L. Ron Hubbard,
Scientology’s founder, as a part of his elaborate “ethics” scheme in which
everybody in the world was ranked according to their usefulness or faithful
servitude to Scientology. In 1967 Hubbard sent out a letter headed “Penalties
for Lower Conditions” (available online at http://www.xenu.net/fairgame-e.html)
which explains that people in the lowest “ethics” condition, “Enemy,” “may be
deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any
discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”
Hubbard formally revoked the “fair game” policy a year later but, according to
the former Scientologists interviewed in this program, the church still acts on
the policy — it just no longer calls it that. Rinder said in the program he got
disillusioned with the church when he had to cover up for David Miscavige,
current head of Scientology, who took over the church after Hubbard’s death in
1986 and who seems to have established his own personal craziness as part of it
(sort of like Stalin after Lenin), including physically attacking
Scientologists who displease him in some way. Rinder had been assigned to the
Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), Scientology’s internal discipline regime,
and was living in an un-insulated trailer on the grounds of Scientology’s
worldwide headquarters in Hemet, California (though they also have a setup in
Clearwater, Florida that houses the Sea Org — Scientology’s main governing
body, whose name is a relic of the time in the late 1960’s when Hubbard decided
to evade the growing scrutiny of the British government of his operations there
by relocating to a ship called the Apollo,
which except when it needed provisions would be kept in international waters
and therefore no government would have jurisdiction over it) when he was
assigned to stop a documentary critical of Scientology being filmed by a
British journalist named John Sweeney.
He gave an interview to Sweeney in which
he said the accusations that Miscavige physically attacked people were
“ridiculous,” but the task of defending a psycho against a journalist who was
on to the truth about him was too much for Rinder. He describes his walkout in
dramatic terms — he just walked out of the Scientology building, bought a
ticket on the London Underground and turned up at the doorstep of one of his
few non-Scientologist friends and asked for help — but the real tragedy was he
left his entire family, including a dying mother as well as his wife and their
three kids, behind in the church — and naturally the church used them as
weapons to try, not necessarily to get him back, but at least to shut up. He
relocated to Clearwater, remarried, had a son with his new wife (lucky kid; at
least he’ll be spared the horrors
of growing up in Scientology), got a job with a car dealership — and got
regularly picketed by Scientologists carrying signs accusing him of being a
drug addict, a child molester, and everything else they could think of. Rinder
also discovered that the Church of Scientology had literally bugged his home
through a camera concealed in a birdhouse that was photographing his property
24/7, and he found that under Florida law, unless the picketers actually came
on his property, they weren’t breaking the law and there was nothing he could
do about them. What’s fascinating about this show is that the conditioned
response of the Church of Scientology to any criticism, from defectors, journalists or anyone
else, is to unleash a nasty barrage of attacks — sort of like Donald Trump
(they should feel right at home in TrumpAmerica!) — as salon.com writer Melanie
McFarland wrote about this show (http://www.salon.com/2016/11/30/aes-leah-remini-scientology-and-the-aftermath-your-antidote-to-seasonal-belief-disorder/),
“Including excerpts of these letters in the telecast is the network’s way of
covering its backside from a legal perspective, a stipulation probably required
by the church. Doing so also has precisely the opposite effect of what the
Church of Scientology intended, in that they further solidify any outrage a
person might feel at hearing allegations of physical, psychological and sexual
abuse recounted in Remini’s series. … Knowing that
Remini’s series has so vociferously riled up the church has to have goosed the
curiosity of the A&E audience far more than if it had done the minimal
disavowal and left it at that. Which (insert uninhibited, maniacal laugh track
here) would never happen.”
