Director Alex Gibney’s exposé of the church includes allegations about Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and its leadership, and the church is firing back.
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HBO
PARK CITY, Utah — Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered to a packed theater on Sunday at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, contains a litany of damning allegations about the secretive and litigious church from several former high-ranking Scientology officials and high profile ex-members.
But virtually none of the revelations are all that new.
Directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and based on Lawrence Wright's book of (almost) the same name, Going Clear alleges, among other things, that Scientology leader David Miscavige orchestrated the divorce between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman after Cruise grew too distant from the church, including having Kidman's phone tapped and turning her children against her.
It alleges that the church subsequently groomed actress and Scientologist Nazanin Boniadi to be Cruise's girlfriend, including hair coloring and $20,000 in designer clothing, only to be summarily dumped and punished with menial labor after she was perceived to have slighted Miscavige at Cruise's home.
It alleges that the church has leveraged a trove of deeply personal information about member John Travolta — including implications about the actor's sexuality — to keep Travolta in the Scientology fold.
It alleges that Miscavige confined top lieutenants in what is characterized as a "prison camp," and also called "the hole," and subjected them to regular bouts of physical abuse.
It alleges that while tax documents reveal the church is valued at over $1 billion (at least), its membership rolls roughly number at just 50,000.
It alleges that church members are forced to sever all ties, or "disconnect," with family members who aren't a part of Scientology and/or are deemed a "suppressive person" by criticizing the church.
And it alleges that the church's core beliefs, written by founder L. Ron Hubbard and available only after years of involvement and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on church teachings, are rooted in a wildly outlandish science-fiction narrative. It involves a supreme alien overlord named Xenu and frozen alien bodies dropped in volcanos on Earth who then become "body thetans" that attach themselves to our bodies and are the source of all our fears and anxieties.
When reached for comment regarding the allegations in Going Clear, a spokesperson for the church provided the following statement to BuzzFeed News:
The accusations made in the film are entirely false and alleged without ever asking the Church. As we stated in our New York Times ad on January 16, Alex Gibney's film is Rolling Stone/University of Virginia redux. The Church is committed to free speech. However, free speech is not a free pass to broadcast or publish false information. Despite repeated requests over three months, Mr. Gibney and HBO refused to provide the Church with any of the allegations in the film so it could respond. Had Mr. Gibney given us any of these allegations, he would have been told the facts. But Gibney refused to speak with any of the 25 Church representatives, former spouses, and children of their sources who flew to New York to meet and provide him and HBO with firsthand knowledge regarding assertions made in Mr. Wright's book as that was all we had to guess from. Gibney's sources are the usual collection of obsessive, disgruntled former Church members kicked out as long as 30 years ago for malfeasance, who have a documented history of making up lies about the Church for money. We invite you to view our complete statement, correspondence, and documented facts at freedommag.org/hbo.
Of course, church spokespeople have denied many of the aforementioned allegations in the past as well.
In response to the church's statement, a representative for Gibney directed BuzzFeed News to the director's comment that recently appeared in the New York Times:
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