Ex-Scientologist story #370, Tommy Davis caught in a lie.

 

The subject of disconnection has always been an embarrassment to the cult of Scientology.   It has a very important function and that is that it serves to keep intact the insulation between members and the real world.  Once that protective coating is breached fact, truth and history can seep in.  And once they find the Internet it is usually all over.   In this story below former member Shane Clark had foresight enough to tape record a conversation with DM’s flunky, Tommy Davis. 

Village Voice: Tape proves Church of

Scientology has lied  about shunning

pariahs

posted by Rob Kerby, Sr. Editor, 9/4/11.

The Village Voice has obtained an audiotape secretly recorded in December 2009 at a meeting between Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis and a man named Shane Clark. The purpose of the meeting: Clark was facing the prospect of being declared a “suppressive person” by the Church of Scientology, carrying with it the prospect of Clark being “disconnected” by his entire family, who are all Scientologists.Just a year earlier, in May, 2008, Davis had appeared on CNN and claimed that the policy of “disconnection” does not exist. But in the audiotape he speaks openly about it, saying at one point, “It is what works. It is what safeguards the church.”Since that meeting, Clark, 30, has indeed been “declared” by the church, and his family — his parents, his brother and his sister — have all disconnected from him, cutting him out of their lives entirely.

Clark’s crime? He was employed by a man named Marc Headley, a former Scientologist who defected in 2005 and subsequently became an outspoken critic of the organization.

In the recording, Davis makes it plain that unless Clark quits his job and disassociates himself from Headley, he will be declared a suppressive person, or “SP.” According to church doctrine, Scientologists in good standing are not to communicate with people who have been declared SPs. To indicate the seriousness of the situation, at the beginning of the meeting, Davis announces that he is going to tape it. “I was going to record this, our conversation. I didn’t know if you were aware of it. For both of our benefit,” Davis can be heard to say.

What Davis was not aware of, however, was that Clark was also taping the meeting.

Clark’s recording of the meeting was made available to the Voice some time ago by Headley, Clark’s friend and now former employer. Since then, we have authenticated it, transcribed it, and turned a large portion of it into short movies so that our readers can view the words as Tommy Davis speaks them.

Last week, the Voice made numerous phone calls, left voice mail messages, and e-mailed Tommy Davis and the Scientology media desk seeking comment on this recording. We received no reply.

Tommy Davis was once a fairly ubiquitous face for Scientology, appearing on a CNN special series about Scientology last year, and also on widely seen programs in the UK and Australia. The son of Scientologist actress Anne Archer, Davis rose to become Scientology’s chief spokesman following the defection of his predecessor, Mike Rinder, . . ,”

To hear Tommy’s lies and the rest of this story follow this link.  I should say that his mother, besides being an  actress and Scientology member, is also the founder of the Scientology front group , Artists for Human Rights.   As to whose rights she is talking about she does not say.

 http://blog.beliefnet.com/news/2011/09/village-voice-tape-proves-church-of-scientology-has-lied-about-shunning-pariahs.php

As of this date 12/7/11 Tommy has not been heard from for a while.  We look forward to his return. 

Just for the fun of it I am posting this picket from March of 2009.  All hail Xenu!!

Ex-Scientologist story #369, Mike Clancey ditches Scientology.

The nasty and greedy cult.

Here are a couple of videos concerning former Scientologist and Sea Org member Mike Clancey.  He had a rough time of getting back into society due to the paranoid Scientology training that he had.  This has a good ending though, I wish more such stories did.  Here Mike is being interviewed by Carolyn Schuk reporter for the Santa Clara Weekly.

For no good reason I am putting this 2009 protest in New Haven, CT.  As always the cultists come across as slightly wormy dinks.

Ex-Scientology Story #368, Life below decks on the cult’s slave ship.

The Ramana Dienes-Browning story.

While big-name star Tom Cruise partied and danced with wild abandon in one of the lounges aboard the Scientology ship Freewinds, below decks there was other activity going on.  Activities that are not at all party related.  Besides catering to the whims of super-stars and Scientologists who came aboard for upper level courses there was the mundane running of the ship; there were rooms to clean, food to prepare, laundry to wash, engines to keep running and bilges to clean.  This was more intense than on any ordinary cruise ship; being Scientologists they had to deal with punishments for “ethics” violations; not to mention the many upsets from unhappy members that needed to be dealt with or maybe even sort out somebody’s “disconnection.”  There could also be unpleasant “flaps” for financial reasons; not everyone gets thrilled at the idea of coming into port owing ten’s of thousands of dollars to Scientology for books or services  they didn’t know they needed.   The friction caused by getting a sizeable number of Scientologists together in one place; worse yet because they were on a ship and couldn’t duck out a back door, was enormous.  The stress produced from high-pressure sales is something nobody in their right mind would want; anger and tears must have been frequent results of this treatment.

Age is no bar to hard work and responsibly and the frequent punishments in Scientology.  It is a scandal on shore the way Scientologists treat their children; at sea without any fear of laws Scientology can have its way with their followers with virtual impunity.  Mere teenagers are worked and treated like slaves.

Here is what the “Village Voice Blog” had to say, excerpts are taken from this story:

Scientology Cruise Ship as Hellhole: The

Ramana Dienes-Browning Story

By Tony Ortega, Sun., Dec. 4 2011 at 6:04 PM

Last week, Steve Cannane of Australia’s ABC network and its program Lateline broke the story of Valeska Paris, a woman who says she was held against her will on Scientology’s private cruise ship, the Freewinds, from 1996 to 2007.In that story, Cannane also talked to Ramana Dienes-Browning, a former senior executive on the ship who backed up Valeska’s claims. “She had been sent to the ship so as not to be in contact with one of her parents and that’s not what she wanted. She was very, very distressed,” Ramana said of Valeska. “Do you consider it now it to be imprisonment?” Cannane asked her. “Yes, yes, I would definitely consider it imprisonment because there was no choice in the matter,” she answered. . . “Basically, I was raised in it,” she says. “I went to a Scientology school. I started on course at the org in Sydney probably from about 7.””Because I was so young, I didn’t have any other reference points. My dad lived in Tasmania, and I would visit him on school holidays. But Scientology was everything, and there was nothing to compare it to. It was a slow and steady brainwashing. They really are control techniques,” she says of the “communications” classes that Scientologists start out with in their careers. “You don’t even realize it when you’re in, but it’s what happens as soon as you step in and do these communications courses.”[ She went on the Freewinds with her mother and got the hard sell to join the Sea Org.  Being raised as a Scientologist she found it impossible to say no.  Her mother went along with it; so at age 15 this girl was a member of the paramilitary force, the “Sea Org,” that runs Scientology.  Life is the Sea Org is one of privation.  The only people who seem to enjoy it are the sadists who get off on making others miserable.  Like all SO members she had to start at the Estates Project Force.  She soon got married to another SO member.  But even marriage could not prevent her superiors from snooping into her sex life.  Scientology is priggish on the subject of sex; Hubbard was not in sufficient health for sexual activity when he wrote the majority of his “tech” so he took a sour view of the hanky-panky that he himself could no longer enjoy.  While on the ship she learned about several women who were being held there as prisoners in the RPF, the internal prison system of the cult.]

Ramana Dienes-Browning, happy to be out of Scientology [Photo: Jason Sinclair

I  asked Ramana what EPF training was like. “It’s like training for the Army, but you don’t get to use guns. You run everywhere. You do heavy labor — I remember breaking through walls with sledgehammers, and the person who runs it is like an Army sergeant,” she says.

“It took me about three months to do the EPF. I was pretty homesick, but I was caught up in the excitement of the adventure I was on. Just before I turned 16, I completed it and was flown to the ship,” Ramana says.

She was assigned to the Commodore’s Messengers Organization (CMO) because it was the division that had recruited her. The CMO had been created when Hubbard was plying the Mediterranean in 1969 and assembled a group of young sailors to carry his dispatches and generally run errands for him. Decades later, it was now one of the more powerful Sea Org divisions, and oversaw services on the ship, making sure church members paying those high prices were pleased with their experience. . .

Ramana says that her husband was the ship’s “LRH Host,” a member of the CMO who made sure the highest level of services were being delivered to guests of the ship. His “statistics” declined at some point, and she says it could have been from a number of different causes — perhaps fewer church members had decided to fork out for the expensive ship packages and attendance was lower. She can’t really be sure. But for whatever reason, her husband’s statistics were down, and that meant he had to be interrogated by ethics officers.

During such interrogations, questioners assume that a church member is hiding dark, sinister problems from Scientology, and so the interview subject is put on the spot about his or her most personal experiences. As many ex-Scientologists have told me, ethics officers seemed most interested in their sexual practices, and, while they were being monitored on the e-meter, they were asked to confess to sexual aberrations.

When her husband was interrogated, Ramana says, he admitted that he’d been masturbating.

“It’s hard to talk about it, but it’s important for me to tell this because it happens in the Sea Org,” Raman told me as she explained what happened next.

“He was masturbating because I wasn’t satisfying him. So I was hauled in before six or seven Sea Org members and humiliated because I wasn’t satisfying him,” she said.

“When your stats are down, nothing is private. The subject of sexual aberrations is very fascinating to Scientology auditors, when you’re not producing as much as you’re supposed to be. So when you get investigated you get put on the meter and any kind of sexual activity will be brought up.”

Ramana says when she was brought into the room with half a dozen Sea Org members, the first thing said to her was by her superior, the Commanding Officer of the CMO, a woman named Pilar:

“She said, ‘You little fucking bitch.’ She proceeded to tell me that he was found to be masturbating, and that he was touching me but I wasn’t touching him back, and that I was forcing him to masturbate because I wasn’t doing it for him. That I was evil, and how could I do that to him.”

Her husband was also in the room, she says. “He was just numb. We didn’t talk about it between ourselves. Pilar assigned me to Lower Conditions, and she sent me on my way. I can’t remember if I was sent to the engine room, but I think I was.”

Ramana believes that she was assigned the ethical condition of “Treason,” which is below “Enemy” but above “Confusion” on Hubbard’s scale.

Soon afterwards, her husband was sent away from the ship for training. “We probably didn’t see each other for a year. Later on, our relationship broke down and we got divorced,” she says. They were married at the end of 1995, and split up at the end of 1998, she remembers. . .

The Rehabilitation Project Force is Scientology’s punitive detail for members who have fallen out of favor. (The church insists that the RPF is voluntary and members go there for spiritual rejuvenation. Every ex-Scientologist I’ve talked to describes the RPF as anything but voluntary, a hellish sentence of hard labor and humiliation.) Two women had been assigned to the RPF on the ship before she arrived, Ramana remembers, and a third woman was added later. “They were there almost the whole time I was on the ship — five years,” she says. After a suicide attempt, the third woman was moved to a more standard RPF facility in either Los Angeles or Clearwater, Ramana recalls.

“They were heavily guarded. It was completely confidential that there was an RPF on the ship. I didn’t have any conversations with these women — you aren’t supposed to talk to people on the RPF — but I can’t imagine that they were happy to be on the ship,” she says. . .

[After a failed attempt at leaving she was thrown into the engine room in an attempt to break her down for good.]  “It was intensely arduous work, cleaning inside the engines. You’d get covered in engine oil, which you’d have to clean off with diesel, and then you’d get that off with a special soap. So you’d stink of diesel all the time. Anyone who stunk of diesel, you’d know they’d been in trouble. So it was kind of a stigma of stinking like diesel,” Ramana says.

“A lot of the work I did was in very small, confined spaces. It was quite scary. There was a fear of getting stuck under the deck plates or in the piping. So I struggled with that. And I worked by myself most of the time. I found that quite depressing. You’re working in really hard conditions, you’re confined in claustrophobic conditions, and you didn’t know when it would end. It was an open-ended punishment, and the only way it would end was if you were reformed. That’s why I say these were mind-control techniques.”

I asked her if she wore special clothing or equipment in that kind of environment.

“We just wore normal cotton shorts and overalls,” she says. “I was working one time in a very small pipe, having to clean the rust out from the inside. It was pitch black and I had a small lamp. I could hardly move. I got industrial paint chips in my eyes, and had to move incrementally to get out” before she could wash out her eyes.

Eventually she got off the ship and out of Scientology, thank God.  For the rest of the story go here:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/12/ramana_dienes_browning_scientology_freewinds.php

For the related story of Valeska Guider Paris go here:   http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/11/valeska_paris_scientology_freewinds.php

Or here for the Daily Mail version of the above story.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2068284/Valeska-Paris-claims-Church-Scientology-imprisoned-cruise-ship-12-years.html

For another related story of Don Jason,  a top-ranked Scientologist who used a home made roller pin to help him escape from the Freewinds, https://androvillans.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/ex-scientologist-story-238-don-jason-jumps-ship/

Scientology were fools for buying this ship in the first place as naval architect Lawrence Woodcraft tells.  The ship was filled with blue asbestos, the most lethal variety.  Woodcraft suggested sinking it in deep water, but Bitty Miscavige and the tech of L. Ron Hubbard thought otherwise.  The ship should be renamed as the “Mesothelioma.”  For this story go here: https://androvillans.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/ex-scientologist-story-139-asbestos-death-ship-ots-not-to-worry/