SIO19: Interview with Ron Miscavige

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 19, and I've got a very long, special, amazing interview for you with Ron Miscavige, who of course is the father of David Miscavige, a name you should likely know, the sort of cult leader of Scientology. Really fascinating interview, I'm so glad that Ron Miscavige was able to join us. Special thanks to the people over at Mythicist Milwaukee, they kind of facilitated this. So thanks to those guys for sure, and wow, let's get right to it.

0:01:12 Thomas: Joining me right now is Ron Miscavige. Ron, how are you doing today?

0:01:15 Ron: I'm doing pretty good.

0:01:16 Thomas: This was so interesting to me because the folks over at Mythicist Milwaukee sent an email and they said you were doing interviews, and you have such a fascinating story being the father of David Miscavige, which, so I thought, what an opportunity to have you on the show to get your story and to really learn kind of what you've been through and what you're seeing. So thank you so much for coming on.

0:01:38 Ron: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm glad to do this. This is something that I really want to do more of because I want to expose what happens with that church and of course, I would call it a cult, but they are, you know, a government-sanctioned church with the tax relief they get from being a church, but I'm very, very happy to do it.

0:01:55 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, wouldn't be the first person who's called Scientology cult that I've heard. So let's get into it, though. You there pretty early on, right? You've been a part of the church for a very long time. I want to hear how that started. And I mean, no spoilers, but I'm really curious to hear what led to your leaving the church. But let's, why don't we start at the beginning, if you don't mind?

0:02:21 Ron: Well, I'll tell you what. Let me give you a little back story before we get started, and then we can take it with that kind of theme or tone in mind. My wife and I escaped from the Church of Scientology on March 25, 2012. Now, I say escape because that's what we did. We planned this escape for six months.

0:02:25 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Oh, wow.

0:02:43 Ron: About a year and a half later, a private investigator was caught around the corner from my house trying to buy a house so he could spy on me, gave the cop some lip, and the cop, who was Nick Pye, said, "Hey, man, you're under arrest, and can I look in your car?" Guy said yes, and his van was parked just around the street, as a matter of fact, on the side of my house. In that van, in the trunk, they found five handguns, five license plates from different states, a stun gun, two rifles, one fitted up with with a homemade silencer, and over 2,000 rounds of ammunition, and they were being paid $10,000 a week to follow me, to report on my doings, from eight o'clock in the morning till eight o'clock at night, or later if I was out.

0:03:30 Ron: So that's a little bit of a backdrop, and it's actually not the total reason that I wrote the book. The main reason I wrote this book is because my daughters were forced to disconnect from me, and a little bit of a purpose in exposing this to many people, because I don't want to get involved with this thing because it'll come to no good, I can tell you. So anyway, you want to start from the beginning where this started? Yeah.

0:03:55 Thomas: Sure, sure. And you mentioned the book, that's Ruthless, right? Scientology, my son, David Miscavige and me. Just wanted to get the name out there for people who wanted to check it out. But yeah, let's with that ominous kind of backdrop that you've painted, scary stuff there. Let's go back to the beginning though.

0:03:59 Ron: Yes. That's Exactly Right. Okay.

0:04:11 Ron: So how I got involved in Scientology was in the 60s, my friend Nelson Sandy said to me one day, "Ron, how would you like to make an extra hundred thousand dollars a year?" And, you know, this is in the 60s, that's a lot of money. I said, you know what, the hell, sure. By the way, Nelson was a character. He was a singer also, in addition to being a salesman. And he's the one that said to me, "I used to be a doctor, but I lost my patience." I don't know, it's still funny today. We were playing a gig in New York one time in Greenwood Lakes, and he came off the stage.

A guy came over to him at the bar and said, "Nelson, you're a great singer, can I buy you a drink?" And he said, "No, but can I have the money?" But anyway, he could pull these lines out of a hat, and he's the one that got me interested in a thing called Holiday Magic, which was a multi-level marketing thing.

And I got involved in it, and with three other people, we had a team of people we'd go around and try to get people to sign up. We would go around doing opportunity meetings and telling people how they could make money doing this, which is basically there were

0:04:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:17 Ron: Different levels of buying the product. If you come in at a high level, you spent more money to get in at that level, but somebody would come in under you, you'd make the difference between what he paid and what what you paid. That's how it worked. But anyway, it's

0:05:28 Thomas: Yeah, one of those pyramid scheme kind of things, or at least something like that.

0:05:32 Ron: Exactly that. It's Exactly that. Yeah. So now we're at an opportunity meeting and I'm talking to somebody and this person next to him said to this person on my left, "I'm a Scientologist." For some reason, that rang a bell with me. I don't know what it was, but I stopped talking to the guy I was talking to. I said, "Hold it. What is that? What is Scientology?" I pinned him down for about 30 minutes and had him tell me me about it.

And very interesting to me for whatever reason. And one of the things he said was that, look, if you get in Scientology, you don't have to ever take another aspirin for a headache. Well, boy, that's interesting. So he gave me this little drill to do. And I said, well, I don't know the headache now, so I can't even try it. But anyway, a couple of weeks later, I'm driving down one of the interstates in New Jersey, where I lived, I realized I had a a headache, so I tried it. I did this little drill, and in an instant my headache went away, and I thought, you know what, I've got to check this out.

So I started going to a place in South Jersey in Woodbury, it was a cafeteria that a guy by the name of Frank Ogle owned, and on every Tuesday, it was either Tuesday or Wednesday, I'm not sure exactly right now, he would have a meeting of all these people and he'd talk about Scientology, and we would discuss it and do little drills and stuff.

I found it very interesting, and I learned some things about communication that helped me and went out into life, and it increased my capabilities of handling life. And after about maybe a month at that, okay, I, I know what it's about, and I just stopped going to it. But a purpose of me telling you that

0:05:32 Thomas: Yeah, okay.

0:07:05 Ron: That is this: David, from the day he was born, was cursed with an unbelievable, unbelievable asthmatic condition. I mean, as a little kid, sometimes he would, and in his condition he could breathe in, but he couldn't blow the air out. Sometimes he used to turn blue, and it was just horrifying to me, and really saddening to me, because all of my other kids were all healthy. I had two other girls and a son, healthy, strong kids. And David, when this would happen, boy, it was, it was terrible. And I'm the one who took him to the doctor for help, and one of the things I would would do is take him to a doctor in Burlington, New Jersey, by the name of Dr. Ziegler, and he'd give him a shot of adrenaline, which would cool it.

But boy, I knew that there's something wrong with giving a little kid a drug. So I was always on the lookout for what would help him. I tried many different unusual solutions. One of them was one winter, he's having this attack, and boy, well, he's turning blue. And I thought, Jesus Christ, they got to do something. So I took him upstairs to the bathroom. This is the wintertime in Jersey now. And I took his clothes off in mine. I went in the shower and I turned the water on warm.

But you can imagine the water coming to the ground in sub freezing weather. I said, OK, Dave, I'm with you on this. I turned off the hot water. That cold water come out like ice and it kicked in. He had to breathe out. He's just started breathing in and out. And I took him out of the shower, rub them down with a Turkish towel. And that was a solution.

0:07:25 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:08:39 Ron: It worked. But I always was looking for something better. Now, knew about Scientology auditing, which is another word for counseling. And it's the way a Scientologist would be trained in a certain procedure where you're talking to another person, but you're not telling them what to think about what they're saying, or you're not making little of what they say, and it's actually quite clever the way it works, because if you're good at it, you can get the person you're auditing to come to his own realization as to how he got this affliction or whatever it is, and many times it would alleviate it. Okay, not like just freewheeling or something. It's very directed at exactly what you want the person to examine in his life to alleviate that for him and see what part he has in causing it. Do you follow me? Are

0:09:36 Thomas: Let me just clarify some background stuff. I was waiting to ask you, but I you've left the church, but it But sounds as though you've had experiences with the practices of the church that, do you still believe in a lot of the claims that the church makes? Like, this would be being an example. Do you see, do You still see these, the Scientology techniques as effective and stuff?

0:09:59 Ron: Certain techniques that you're introduced to when you first joined Scientology. Now, mind you, I came in Scientology in 1970, and it was an exact opposite of what it is today. It went from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to be honest with you, because it was kind of like a free spirit. The people who came into it were looking for answers in life, more relaxed. You literally could have a nice time doing services, especially with communication. This was the big thing that was stressed. And you did improve your communication skills and learn the exact communication formula. And if you go out and practice this in life, you became more able handle situations and gain better interpersonal relations.

0:10:47 Ron: So, yes, it's not something that I believe. It works because it's correct. Correct. Now, the further you go in, there are promises that are made, such as you're going to turn into a supernatural being where you, as a spiritual being, can leave your body and go read a newspaper over in Germany. Thomas, I've been involved in Scientology for over 40 years. I never met one person who achieved that state. I'm not talking about one or two. I don't mean any, ever. Ever. So if you say, do I believe in certain things about it? Yes. And the communication formula in various rock bottom things that you learn. But as you get further in, no, they're not achievable and it's promises that have never been kept.

0:11:32 Thomas: Okay.

0:11:32 Ron: So, okay, with David, I thought, you know what? I'm going to see if I take him to see Frank Ogle, what Frank, Frank Ogle, was the guy that had the cafeteria where I used to go there on Tuesday or Wednesdays, and see if Frank could help him with some Scientology auditing. So I took David out of school one day, took him down there, and told Frank what I wanted him to do, so he says, "Okay, come on, David." So he took him in, what they call a session, 45 minutes later, he come out bright, smiling, I says, "Dave, how's it going?" He says, "It's going great, man, I'm handled." And I'll tell you that 45 minutes did not cure him of asthma, but it put it in remission, and he never had another serious attack as a young child, that to me was amazing. And I'll tell you, for David, I think that was his epiphany, or whatever you would call it, where he says, "Wait a minute, I got to do something with this, this has been cursing me my whole life, this just handled me," he was about nine years old.

0:12:32 Thomas: Sorry if I missed it, but how old was he at this time? Nine years old. Okay.

0:12:38 Ron: Yeah. And I'll tell you something, I mean, even with his asthma, he was a tough little kid. He's very smart, he had a great sense of humor, we got along great, jokes and practical things that I used to do to have fun. Look, when he played Little League football, I've said this before, but I'll tell you again, because I used to have to put a two-and-a-half-pound barbell plate in each of his short pockets. I had to add five pounds to him so he could make the minimum weight to play football in the peewee league or the police league. And he could take down guys 20 pounds heavier than him, that's how tough he was. And just, it's changed, it's changed completely. And I think what changed is the acquisition of power on his part that changed him.

0:12:38 Thomas: And so he went from, uh, sort of a crippling asthma to being able to play sports. It sounds like I

0:13:32 Ron: Oh, not only that, but But he wrestled in the regional Junior Olympics as a wrestler. And he was in three matches one day. I don't know if he ever wrestled.

0:13:45 Thomas: Did actually. Yeah.

0:13:46 Ron: So did I. And I'm going to tell you, after one match, it was like I was done for the day. He won two matches and the third one he just ran out of steam. But he was a tough kid, man. And as I said, we had a great time together when he was growing up. Hey, listen, with my kids, The church bought over 500 variations of my name so that no matter what you put in, it'll take you to their hate site.

0:13:51 Thomas: Yeah, it's really tiring.

0:14:07 Thomas: Really? Oh, wow.

0:14:13 Ron: And it's character assassination. I mean, they say things about me that, I'm a beast. Yet, listen to this. When the kids were growing up, I taught all of them how to cook. If we were going to fix the car, the boys would always help me. The girls went to dancing lessons. We took vacations where the girls danced down at Tony Grant's down in Atlantic City. It just, we had a great time. We had a swimming pool close by. I taught all of them to swim when they were three years old, uh, how to dive off a three meter board when they were five years old. Listen, on my 70th birthday, David and my two daughters shipped in and bought me a car. Okay. On my 75th birthday my daughter sent me 75 gifts. I could not get off time from the sea organization to see them.

0:14:59 Ron: So they came out to California to see me when they, We spent about five days together at a place called Celebrity Center. Now, I went from that into this hateful character that they are trying to character assassinate simply because of what I'm saying in the book. So maybe I got a little ahead of myself, but I wanted to.

0:15:15 Thomas: Yeah Yeah, that's okay. But, when I had Chris Shelton on, they, once he was featured on Leah Remini's show, uh, they had a hit page up on him as well, and it's definitely something that that that, yeah, that's their strategy, isn't it, to just character assassinate. Uh, whoever they disagree with

0:15:29 Ron: Well, yeah, it is to character assassinate you. And, I mean, I have policies, and if you want them, we have soft copies of them where one of the policies they have, it says in there, find or manufacture data about the person, find or manufacture, there's another one that it said, if possible, utterly ruin the person. This is their policy, and of course, I'm sure you've heard a fair game somewhere along the way.

0:15:32 Thomas: Yeah yeah. Uh, You know, that's not ringing a bell, maybe, uh, maybe I'm forgetting the term, hmm.

0:15:59 Ron: Well, this is the one where somebody who's declared to be an enemy of a church, you can, you can destroy him as a Scientologist with no penalty. I can send you these if you'd like when we're done, this, you give me, your, give me, me your email, I'll send it out to you, and you can just read these and see what I'm talking about.

0:16:08 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Sure. Let's do it. Am I allowed to, can I post them with the show, or yeah

0:16:18 Ron: They're, you can do whatever you want. It's their policy. I'm not writing these for you. I'll give you a copy of it, and yes, you kan do that. And not only that, these are not like confidential in some place where I had to steal them. They're right in their public materials. Yep.

0:16:25 Thomas: All right. Let's do it. Oh, Okay, but either way, still useful, uh, useful information to know about the church, so, all right, but, uh, but back in the story, it, so it sounds like having that asthma be, uh, put in remission was a very powerful thing for David.

0:16:50 Thomas: And, uh, and that might have been started him along the way of, of his, uh, where to where he is now, I, I suppose.

0:16:50 Ron: It Was it was. Oh, I'm sure it did, it's not even a guess, I'm, I'm sure it did. To take it a little further, um, we all went into Scientology proper in those days, this is in 1970, and, um, we would go down there on the weekends to the Scientology mission at one Cherry Hill, the mission holder's name was Norm Muller, and and we did services there. And then I, the next year, took my whole family, lock, stock, and barrel, took us to England for about a year and three months and put everybody on Scientology courses. I mean, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Scientologist. I would get a lot of people involved in it too.

0:16:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:34 Thomas: Well, I'd assume you'd have to be to be in, you know, you were involved for what, 40 years or so. I mean, I would hope you were, you Were pretty into it for that time.

0:17:40 Ron: We have 40. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then, uh, came back to the States for a little bit, and then we went over there again for about A Year and Three Months. That second time I went over, I got a recording deal. By the way, I'm a musician. I don't know whether you knew that.

0:17:53 Thomas: No, I didn't know that. Cool.

0:17:54 Ron: Oh, yeah, I've done it my whole life. I've been playing professionally since I'm 13 years old. And as a matter of fact, this month I have 10 gigs. So, yeah.

0:18:02 Thomas: Wow. Jeez. Still going pretty strong. 10 gigs.

0:18:06 Ron: I enjoy playing. And I play a cornet, but I should say trumpet because these days a lot of people don't know what a corinet is. It's a version of a trumpet. Trumpet. But anyway, I got a recording deal with Paul and the Records for a solo album. That was the second time we were over there, and a writer's contract with Chappell's Publishing, and I was asked to play on BBC. So both trips were very successful. Now, getting back to this story, though, now we're living in Broomhall, Pennsylvania, and I came home from work one day, and David is laying in bed and kind of his hands are behind his head and I says, "Hey, what's up, man?" He says, "Dad," he says, "I can't take school anymore," he says, "All the kids are taking drugs, everybody misbehaves, they don't want to learn anything, they're, they're rude to the teachers," he says, "I just don't wanna do this anymore." I said, "What, what do you wanna do?" He says, "I'd like to go and help L.

0:18:08 Thomas: Neat.

0:19:02 Ron: Ron Hubbard exactly what he said. He says, I want to join the Sea Organization. Now, I don't know if you know much about the Sea Organization, but it is the elite. This is, when you join that, you're committing yourself and future lives to help Scientology be disseminated and applied to all the people of the world, okay? So David says this to me, and I thought, Jesus, he's 15 years old. And I thought to myself, well, you know what? I was 17 years old when I joined the Marine Corps. And I knew that I wanted to do that. My dad had a sign for me, because if you're under 18, you can't join on your own.

And, I remember asking him to sign for me, and he says, Ronnie, are you sure you want to do this? He says, Christ, they're the first ones in, you know. I said, yeah, I want to do it, Dad. Turned out that it was one of the most profitable times I've ever spent in my life. I can remember the first night in in boot camp, and I'm not going to use vulgarity because you're going to have to beep it out anyway, or maybe not, but I

0:19:14 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:20:03 Thomas: No, no, I don't. I don't have to. Whatever. It's up to you.

0:20:06 Ron: Okay, well I, this is the first night in boot camp. By the way, did you ever see Full Metal Jacket, the movie?

0:20:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah It's been a little while, but yeah, I do remember that movie. Yeah.

0:20:16 Ron: The way they dramatize that is exactly how the first knight is.

0:20:17 Thomas: Yeah. Now.

0:20:20 Ron: And I said to myself, this was the worst fucking mistake I've ever made in my life.

0:20:26 Ron: Anyway, about in those days, I don't know whether it was 10 or 12 weeks later I thought to myself I can make myself do anything. They turned me from an undisciplined civilian into a disciplined United States Marine, and I am telling you that discipline has helped me my entire life in every one of my endeavors. So I knew that that's what I wanted to do when I was 17. It turned out to be a great move. David wants to do this. And And already he's an auditor. He's trained in these procedures to take another person and talk to them and audit them on the Scientology stuff.

0:21:07 Thomas: How unheard of would that have been for someone of his young age? Was that, uh, was he, you know? Yeah.

0:21:13 Ron: He was a phenomenon. He was just – and he was good at it too. It's not like he was a stumble bum or something. He knew what the hell he was doing, you know. So I said, well, okay, Dave, if you really want to do it. Yeah, I really do. I said okay, I'll help you out. So I bought him clothes and I gave him money and I bought a plane ticket so he could fly down to Clearwater. And the day of his 16th birthday, the day after, he got on an airplane, flew down, joined the sea organization down there, and within seven or eight months, he was working directly with L. Ron Hubbard.

0:21:14 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

0:21:49 Ron: Yeah. So found a purpose, and he just poured the coals on it. And problem is this. Yes. I think David, no matter what he did, be a success at it. It just happened to be that here was an opportunity for him to do something that really helped him in his life. He was able to help other people, and he saw the opening, and he ran. And I'll tell you this, once L. Ron Hubbard died, he started moving up through the power structure, got people out of the way who didn't want to have anything to do with him, put people in who would read with him, and he rose, and he assumed the the head of the church.

And an interesting part that belongs in this interview is this: did have a severe asthmatic attack then, and he had to be taken to the emergency room at the hospital, and the guy who took him there was a guy by the name of Paul Grady. And Paul told me that David said to him when he got out of the emergency room they handled it, because medical technology is light years beyond what it was when he was just a little kid.

0:22:00 Thomas: And

0:22:55 Ron: But anyway, he come out, and he said to Paul, he says, I just had a realization, Paul. While I was in the hospital, I realized power is not granted. It is assumed. And he assumed the leadership of the Church of Scientology, and he rose to that, and that's how he got there. There's one.

0:23:16 Thomas: That was Was that in the 80s or, yeah?

0:23:18 Ron: Yeah. There's one hair in the ointment, and I'll tell you what it is right now, okay? I'm sure you've heard this, but I'm going to tell it again. Did you ever hear the statement that power corrupts? The guy who says that was a guy by the name of Lord Acton. And the exact quote is this: power tends to corrupt. And he goes on further to say, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And by the way, I'll tell you another thing he said that very few people know: great men are almost always bad men. You can look this up, Lord Acton. Interesting, though, and I'll say it that acquisition of power is the thing that, as far as I'm concerned, turned David from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. He was not that way when he was a little kid, but power itself, I think, is like a drug. You get some of it and you want more, and you don't want to let go of that power, and you went more and more and power.

0:23:19 Thomas: Okay. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:20 Ron: And I think this is what's contributed to Scientology being what it is today, which is basically a fundraising outfit. They want more and more money to build buildings and, uh, you say that they're expanding the church. Well, they're expending it, but there's air in those buildings. There's not new people. And you You know, if you're alive living in this world of the information, you hear all these things and you can go on and see all the lies they've been told, like about L. Ron Hubbard himself, about his war record and things like that, and about the different abuses that have been done.

You don't want to have anything to do with it. I don't know, maybe if you were a shepherd and you never read the newspapers, you'd walk into an organization. But, you know, short of that, I don't know what the hell you'd be thinking about if you walked in now. Now, but they build the buildings to say they're expanding and they're beautiful buildings, beautiful structures. And I did an interview recently with a guy down in Tennessee, and he said he'd go past the building in Nashville. Every time he went by there, nobody was in it. Every time we went by, there was nobody in the building.

0:25:04 Thomas: Can I ask about the sort of, I guess, the the process of of of David turning the church into something that that that what it was today? So I mean, because you, so you left in 2012, maybe talk about the the time between him assuming power and what sort of changes and things that happened that that led to what you see it as today. Yeah.

0:25:50 Ron: Well, yeah, I left in March 25th, 2012. By the way, I left from what is called the Sea Organization. I didn't, you know, I was a public person. When I say public, I would go into a church and buy services or buy this and, you know, avail myself of it. But in 1985, I actually joined the Sea Organisation and worked for them for 26 and a half years. Well, while I was there, life became more intolerable as time went by. I'll give you an example. I lived on a compound, which is called the International Base or Golden Air Productions. And it's very close to Hammett, California, which is, say, southwest, southeast of Riverside.

0:26:39 Ron: And living there, it started to change. Let me just get it so people get a better understanding of this. There are people living on that base, that if you went on the base with a bus and said to everybody, look, you could get on this bus, we'll take you out, we will give you a job, we give you money, we will give a fresh start in life, I don't know if you would get any takers.

I do not know if you would any taker because those people have built a mental prison, and it is done by little agreements that are easy to agree to, to begin with, but then they're added to, and every one of them is like you're building a little prison in your own mind as to why you should never leave there. By the way, I go into this in detail in the book, and when people read it, they're going to see how this metamorphosized into what it is. As an example, if you wanted to send a letter to to somebody, had to put the letter in an open envelope, not sealed, with a stamp on, security would read that.

If there was anything in there that was not what they considered to be not correct, you'd get it back and say, this has got to be corrected, you have to write it again. And until they approved it, that letter would not go out. And your incoming mail would be opened and checked.

And the reason for it being checked was this: look, we don't want you to be upset by sending you bad news because you have an important job to do, so you'd sign over permission for them to open your mail for your own good.

0:27:25 Thomas: And

0:28:16 Ron: You see that? If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to get permission to call out because all of the calls went through a central switchboard, and unknown to us while we were there, there the operator would listen into the phone call for a while to see how it was going, but you had a person on an extension of that phone so that they heard everything that went on between you and the person that you were talking to. This was brought about because there was a guy there who, when Tom Cruise was there, this guy would call his mother and tell her everything that Tom Cruise Cruz was doing, he was getting services there, by the way, and she would sell this information to one of these rags like the National Enquirer. He was caught doing this, so now everybody has to go through the switchboard, and somebody is listening on the other end when you're talking, and it's for your own good, you understand.

0:29:14 Ron: In other words, it's all presented in a way that it's easy to agree to. You're not allowed to go off the base, to go shopping to get little things for yourself. Like, you couldn't just drive off to the main booth, the security booth, and go to Walmart and get some underwear or maybe shaving cream or something. You had to buy it either on the Internet, or they had a little shop, like a PX. You had a buy it there. So your life was completely restricted from morning till night. You'd wake up in the morning, go to breakfast, after breakfast is over you most people in the morning would go and study, noontime you'd have your noon meal, you go to work in the afternoon, you'd come back, have an evening meal, go to work again and work till maybe 10, 11, 12 o'clock, and if there was an event going along sometimes people would work right through the night, but every day was like this. I'll tell you, it was a gray life, it was very grim, and it was surrounded by a fence where there's barbed wire pointing in as well as out.

0:30:16 Thomas: It didn't Start this way though, right? Because I mean, it sounds like it turned very, or, or did it, I mean, mean, was it always kind of that?

0:30:16 Ron: No, no. Absolutely not. For Christ's sake, if it started that way, I'd say, hey, get me the hell out of here, you know.

0:30:23 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, but I meant the Sea Org in general. I know the difference between people being worked into that kind of level of security, but what...

0:30:34 Ron: Look, when I first joined the Sea Org at Christmas time, sometimes we'd be off for two or three days. It was, look, we worked our butts off, but we had good times together. That's how it was. I mean, mean if you're going to be on a purpose where you think is not the actual truth, though, if it were true, I don't know, I might still be there, that what you're doing is disseminating this information to every man, woman and child on the planet, and you're gonna improve their lives, and you're gonna change this civilization so there's no more wars, so there is no more criminals, so the able people can and prosper. Look at this, is a great goal. Do you see that?

0:30:36 Thomas: Sure.

0:31:14 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. You think you're working for something good and in a lot... Basically, the church is taking advantage of a really good attitude, I'm sure, that some people have that they want to work to make the world better. And then, yeah, yeah but I don't know that most people have the the willingness to put in that kind of work for it, but but sure, hmm

0:31:26 Ron: Most people have that attitude. No, that absolutely is true. Well, I'll tell you how it goes. I'll give you an example. When I joined the Marines in boot camp, we started off in our platoon with 89 people. At the end of boot camp, We ended up with 59, one third washout. Some people joined the Sea Org, can't take it, they're out right away. So it's the real stalwarts, the real dedicated people that feel that they're going to help their fellow man, and that's that's how it was. And when I got in, yeah, it was very disciplined, but there was a lot of good times. They say like on Christmas or on Sea Org Day we would have time off, we'd enjoy each other's company. On the weekends, about every second week we could get that, we call liberty. And, it wasn't just like working in a coal mine in the days of Pennsylvania in the late 1800s, where the Molly Maguires were formed to reform the coal mine owners, all right? I don't know if, maybe I shouldn't have entered that in, but I don't know many people that know about that, but you, yeah,

0:31:49 Thomas: Yeah that's good history reference that, I don't get, but I can guess. That's okay, that's

0:32:39 Ron: Yeah. Anyway, look, Look, that's how it was in the beginning. And it slowly but surely turned as the years went by. And as I say, it was a gradient little by little change.

0:32:54 Thomas: When do you first remember thinking, like, yes, this is something's too far or something's fishy, something's, this isn't quite right, you know, when do when you remember first having that inclination, oh sure yeah but roughly speaking, I guess

0:33:03 Ron: Well, I don'T know if there was a I can't name the time, you know, but but but I can tell you it was way before we left. What kept me there, though, was I have a wife who is absolutely the world's greatest optimist. And she always said, Ron, it'll get better. Don't worry about it. It's going to get better, things will change back to where they were when we were having a good time. And then I worked in the music department, and we would have some success, maybe we did a great album and would have a little celebration at that. Now, what the hell, you know, I'm enjoying myself.

0:33:11 Thomas: Hmm

0:33:39 Ron: That's what I did for 26 and a half years. Well, here's the thing well no, what it is is they produce films, technical films to explain various tenets and principles of Scientology. There's always a musical backdrop to that. I wrote melodies, and I, with another guy, would arrange these melodies to fit those films. And then every time you have an event, there's videos made of various successes throughout the world. You know, people applying Scientology to an area, to their lives. We used to write music for that, job, and job. So yeah, when I said we would do an album, maybe we would take some poems as an example that L. Ron Hubbard wrote, put music to it, and do an algorithm of those things.

0:33:39 Thomas: This is a Scientology music department I apologize, I didn't know that. What, what, it you're writing Scientology songs and and albums, or is it just you're doing your music and yeah yeah, so but the the it was getting bad, but your wife, ever the optimist, kind of convinced you that would, it would get better again. Can

0:34:42 Ron: Yeah. But anyway, look, I'll give you an example. When you say, was there a first time? No, but there's things that happened. Like when my nephew Gerard called to tell me that my brother died, I had a person listening on the extension while he's telling me this. For Christ's sake, man, it just didn't seem right. I thought, boy, this is terrible. He was my last, I'm the last one in the family alive now, and I hadn't seen him, and to have somebody listening in on a personal phone call like that, it just really pissed me off, I'll tell you. But then it just, the workload became so dramatic, and became, wouldn't say not worth living, you know, you don't, I never considered doing away with myself, but just to live that life day after day after day with no hope of returning for the better, I tell you, that's a grim proposition.

0:35:36 Thomas: I ask what your relationship with David was like at this time? I mean, is it the kind of thing where you could talk to him about it or give us a picture of what that was like?

0:35:44 Ron: Well, let's put it this way okay when I joined the Sea Org in 1985, I was on the base for a couple weeks, and I saw him walking a little distant from me, and he was with his entourage, he always had people that were with him. I turned, and he was about maybe 30 yards away, something like that. And I said, "Hey, Dave." And he turned and looked at me. And, man, he gave me a look that I knew, Jesus Christ, I better never do that again. Now, when I was on that base and he talked to me, he called me Ron. He didn't call me dad.

0:36:14 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:14 Ron: I was another staff member. At that base, you are considered to be a spiritual being and you're walking around in a body. You're a staff staff member first. They think, and it's considered that no, well, L. Ron Hubbard, not they, considers that no spiritual being is either the father, the sister, the mother of a brother of another spiritual being. The role in life that you have as a father is made little or nothing of, okay? Now, when I got presents from him, it was always dear dad. I always got very nice Christmas presents, birthday presents, but in operating and dealing with him on a work level, I called him sir and he called me Ron. That's how it was.

0:36:15 Thomas: And that's right from the beginning, you're saying, right fromthe beginning. That wasn't like a later, you know, 2000s kind of power to his head kind of thing. That was from the beginning in the 80s.

0:37:13 Ron: Well, okay, let's put it this way. He always called me Ron right from the beginning. It was never quite as severe as it got to be after being there 26 and a half years. It gradiently got worse and worse in that direction. Said in the beginning, you know, we had a lot of, uh, to-dos. We, we, had a, lot of good times together, and that, they got less, and less, and less. And, I mean, I'm sure your listeners know about the hole, and about how people are just kept incarcerated, and they march down to have their meals together, and spend all day confessing sins as to how what they did is, you hurting the efforts that David did in making the church as powerful as it is and getting them tax exemption all day, all day long. That's all they would do, the people in the hole.

0:37:18 Thomas: Oh, have heard that. It's incredible. It is something that as someone who has no experience with this, hard to even believe, not saying I disbelieve it, but just hard to really comprehend it, I suppose. And it is so analogous to totalitarianism. I mean, I mean, it's so, it sounds like North Korea or something. It's, yeah.

0:38:19 Ron: It is. It is. It is analogous to totalitarianism. And this is how it was. And the punishments were – I

0:38:29 Thomas: And when did that start? I mean that kind of, the weird prison stuff. I mean when did THAT start happening?

0:38:35 Ron: Can't put an exact finger on the day or the date or the year. But as time went on, it just became more and more and more draconian. OK, I'll give you an example. We're on Scientology has a ship called the Freewinds and we're on this ship and we're doing a show and there's a guy doing a show with us and he starts talking about, well, my kid was picked up by the cops, but he's a good little kid. Now he's doing the show with the high rollers, a room full of people who come to the ship for a maiden voyage anniversary every year. And he starts popping off his mouth about things he shouldn't be saying. Instead of him being straightened out, the entire band had to go work in the bilges of that ship. Now, do you know what the bilages of a ship are like?

0:39:22 Ron: It's the lowest level, and you'd get down there, and you'd clean it out, and the temperature down there was maybe between 120 and 130 degrees, and it's dirty, sloppy, punishing work. Listen, I was in my 60s when this happened.

0:39:22 Thomas: No, not personally, but I can guess.

0:39:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:39 Ron: There was no concern about that. Not only that, I had a little episode with heart palpitations one time and to see a doctor about it, and he said, "Well, listen, you've got to cut down on your smoke and coffee drink and get a little more sleep." So not a dangerous thing, but nevertheless something I just couldn't let go. And here I am down there in a boiler suit working with the other musicians to, quote, make us better. Let me tell you something, where the fuck does something like that make somebody a better staff member? You know what makes you want to do, leave, and it was, uh, an accumulation of things like that that I finally said to Becky. I said, "Listen, we got to get the hell out of here." And that's when we started planning our escape. We planned our escape for six months. Thomas, well,

0:40:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, you said that earlier. I was really intrigued by it. Why don't you talk about that? What was your first thought?

0:40:30 Ron: Okay. First of all, there was another thing that happened, and I should tell you this. Got a Kindle from David as a gift.

0:40:38 Ron: And the guards, the security guards, really wanted me to give this up. I said, why am I going to give it up? I got it from David. Now, that was protection for me because for them to take that away from me, it would be like a mortal sin. You know, you could go to hell. You wouldn't even go to purgatory. Or you'd go to hell if you took some, a gift that David gave me, and reading a book one day, and I had the old mechanical Kindle where there's a switch that goes right, left, up, down, or you press it in.

I don't know if you have a Kindle or you're familiar with that, but people, okay, well, this had a mechanical switch on it. Now, here's what happened, and this is just maybe fate, but whatever it is, it did happen. I'm looking up a word, and you go to the word, you press in to select the word. And then if you press to the right, it says, you know, go to the library or check the dictionary. I pressed to the write, I pressed it twice, and it said Google. I was on the internet. I was on the internet without a filter.

Because on that base, you could go on the internet to buy the amenities of life, but it was a strict filter. If you mention the word Miscavige or Scientology, you could not get on any of these things. And I, and I started reading about L. Ron Hubbard, about the various things that were said about Scientology, and boy, you talk about

0:41:10 Thomas: Not, not an older one, I've seen the newer ones, but yeah, I don't know the older one, all right. So

0:42:05 Ron: I had to keep this to myself I thought Jesus Christ man I've been living a lie okay oh yeah Yeah, it was like one of those moments, you know, is not somehow it was doing exactly that.

0:42:16 Thomas: It somehow was accessing, it was bypassing that, that filter that they had in place somehow. Well, Like the Kindle came with like an internet plan or something, I just wasn't sure how it was getting through it.

0:42:26 Ron: No. And I think I think that's why the guards wanted to get it back from me, because they knew it had that capability. But I didn't. I was stupid of that fact. You see what I'm saying?

0:42:30 Thomas: Okay. Oh. Yeah. I didn't know that either. I had no idea.

0:42:36 Ron: Yeah. Well, there you go. So that was it. And one of the things that I read about.

0:42:37 Thomas: Yeah. But So, but you must have had, so you, you, you had the desire, like, because it's one thing, I don't know, maybe in 1990 you come across this ability to look stuff up, you probably wouldn't have cared or wouldn't look at it, but you had that in your mind, like, "I have this free access, I'd better check some things out," right? I mean, there must have been, so there was, there was something going on more than just stumbling upon Google, right?

0:43:05 Ron: Well no, because I didn't get the Kindle in the 90s, though.

0:43:05 Thomas: No, I'm just, I'm, I'm sorry, what, what I meant to say was the difference in your mindset between maybe sometime like the early times of the Sea Org, when you were enjoying it, versus whenever this incident happened. Because I'm just saying I could imagine if you were happy with everything and how it was going, you stumble across Google, you don't care. You know, maybe you've, exactly.

0:43:21 Ron: Yeah, that's

0:43:31 Thomas: So I just was trying to point out that you stumbled across Google, but also, you know, you must have had some desire to really get to the bottom of what was going on, right?

0:43:30 Ron: Right. No, I did. And I'm telling you something, it was at a very propitious time that that happened because my mind was open to really finding out how come I'm living this way. Okay. As an example, I could not get time off to go to my grandson's wedding. That was like, I just couldn't do it. Yet other people around me were getting time off. I did not lead a life of special favors because I was his father.

0:43:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:44:13 Ron: Not at all.

0:44:13 Thomas: I was, yeah, I was going

0:44:14 Ron: Jesus Christ, no. It was since I'm his father, I have to set a good example. I have work harder than anybody and just dot all my I's and cross my T's and don't ever say anything politically incorrect. I've never been that type of person my whole fucking life, you know, but This

0:44:14 Thomas: To ask that earlier. Yeah.

0:44:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I meant to ask that earlier, but yeah, it sounded like from your description of your relationship that there, it sort of answered my question that there weren't any special favors.

0:44:32 Ron: Yeah, Listen, I remember I remember this guy coming into our building where we're living, and I see him dragging suitcases. As where were you? I said, he's always off on leave. I, so who died? Because if somebody died you could go. He said, nobody, I just want to see my folks. And I used to think, why can't I see my daughters or go to see brother? But I was not able to, I couldn't get permission to do this.

0:45:01 Thomas: Geez.

0:45:01 Ron: Getting back to the, go on.

0:45:02 Thomas: And You didn't You didn't have any line of communication or any sort of relationship where you could ask him, either it just was, he was so formal and authoritarian about it, you couldn't Even kind Of sure

0:45:10 Ron: Okay. Yeah, but I'll get to that in a minute, what happened, okay? Now, so I'm on the internet. One of the things that happened on that base was a girl named Annie Tidman. She and Pat Broker, well, it used to be Annie Broker. She was married to Pat. They were with L. Ron Hubbard when he died. She is one of the last people to be with him and she was a messenger ever since she was a little girl. So Annie Tidman was on the base and she developed lung cancer. So they sent her to LA with a handler who would be her personal, well handle her needs okay and to give her special auditing and treatment whatever was necessary. Now I go on the internet and I found out that Annie Tidman had died earlier. Nobody on the base knew this. You would ask the medical liaison officer, Martine, how's Annie doing?

0:45:15 Thomas: Sure. Sure, all Right, what

0:46:07 Ron: Oh, she's doing great. She's doing real good, Ron. And one day I'm going into the building, which is the laundry building to get some sheets and we were provided with linens. And there's three girls outside and said, Ron, do you want to chip in some money? We're going to buy Annie a birthday present. And I thought to myself, Jesus Jesus Christ, you're either part of this ruse or you're just as stupid as I was before I found out. It was things like that that just, it ended it for me, okay?

0:46:35 Thomas: Was the purpose of, of that deception, do you, it was just to, I mean, what was the purpose of that I suppose, right?

0:46:41 Ron: The purpose of that was that supposedly the technique that they were going to use on her, which was an advanced level of auditing called NED for OTs, would cure cancer. And it obviously didn't. She died, okay. OK, like, yeah, yes, yes.

0:46:56 Thomas: Okay. So They're trying to keep, make it look like it did work somehow, and I mean, how long could that have possibly continued, though, I did, to this day, or what? Wow.

0:47:06 Ron: To this day, it might because if you're kept in the dark and you keep on asking, oh, she's doing OK, but she's going to be there because she's doing some special things. No, this is how it would go. So now getting back to me and my wife getting ready to get out of there, we got a new music director who I gave up the post because for several reasons. Since I was getting up in age. I just turned 81 last month. And so I was already, I think, 75 when this happened. He did a different style of music than I was ever used to doing, and I just couldn't grasp it. I used to write music, write melodies day after day, week after week, month after month, and they'd all get disapproved by him. I just could not live. And, you know, I would still get paid.

0:47:08 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:56 Ron: I'd get my food and everything. Anything. I've never been a freeloader type of guy. I always feel that you should pay your own way in life. So I wrote to David and I said, listen, I really have to talk to you. So we got together and I Said, David, look, you got to get me another job. I just cannot live this way. I mean, I'll take a job waxing cars and motor pool, but please, I live every day as a failure.

Thomas, it's like you, if you worked for some corporate outfit and every day you came to work with ideas is, and he said, no, this is a piece of shit, these idiots are no good, but you couldn't quit, you had to stay there, it crushed, it, that's exactly right, it crushes you, you feel you have to do something that you can say, I'm worthwhile, I am not just occupying space on this planet, okay, yeah, probably was, you know, but anyway, he says, okay, I'll look into it, He never did, and then it was several months after that, I said to Becky, we got to get out of here. And as I said, we planned our escape for six months, carefully working out each level. And one of the things I would do, and by the way, the whole story of the escape is in the book. And I occasionally reread the book, just keep myself freshened up on various things I could talk about.

And when I read about the escape, I still to this day think, Jesus Christ, did we actually do that? It was, it was one of these things that, this is modern life in the United States of America, free country, yet this is going on where people are held, and they're not only held, they're not held or beyond their wishes, they're held or by their own mind, and they've been

0:48:28 Thomas: Yeah. It hurts your pride, you know, you want to be contributing, you Want, you know, I Get it, yeah, probably More of that Marine training and come in, right? Can

0:49:46 Ron: Trapping themselves by all the little agreements. But the day we escaped, I drove down the road. This This is 9 o'clock in the morning. There's two gates on that base. One of them goes, they both are accessed to go across to the north side, and we lived on the south side.

0:50:04 Thomas: I ask you a question? Sorry, just to clarify before, like to give the background of this escape story. And I apologize if this sounds like a dumb question, but coming from someone who just was not in that situation, when you're planning your escape, do you mean escaping in a way that saves face, escaping in way that they'll maintain relationships, trying to, that sort of thing? Or do you means physically, how am I going to get out of this place?

0:50:32 Ron: How do I physically get out of this place?

0:50:34 Thomas: Wow. So it's like a great escape level kind of thing, like an actual heist kind of thing, trying to

0:50:39 Ron: That's Right, if I Would have been, and let me get back to what I was saying, there's two booths, one of them is the main guard booth where it's a place where they have all kinds of technical electronic equipment where they can see everything on the base that takes place, and it's bulletproof glass around it, and there's a gate that you can go in, and it is worked electronically by the guys in the booth. And then down the road from there, about 300 yards down the road, there's another gate. There's nobody there except a video camera. So that if you drive up to that gate and you press the alarm button, the video camera will show who's driving the car, and if they recognize you and it's okay for you to go across, they may say, well, where are you going?

0:50:40 Thomas: Really, wow, okay.

0:51:27 Ron: I'll say, I'm just going across. Okay, and they'll hit the buzzer and that gate will open. You cannot crash that gate. You'd have to use use a tank to knock it over, okay? Now, morning of our escape, I'm driving down the road. This is at nine o'clock in the morning. And we have a mess hall, which is called MCI, short for Massacre Canyon Inn. It was the name of the place when it was owned as a hot springs resort area. And that's where everybody would go to eat all their meals. Now, when I passed that, I saw the chase car, car, which is a car that the guards had. And they would use it in case somebody were to escape. They'd chase them with the car to catch them to bring them back. And I knew that there was only two guards on duty because we planned this out and I found out all this data.

0:52:16 Ron: The one guard was in the booth and the other guard was having breakfast. So I knew my timing was just right. And I went to the booth, and did this for many, many, many days priorly. On Sunday morning, I would go across to the north side of the base, go to the music studio where there's a refrigerator, and I used to keep, like, Italian salami, prosciutto, Parmesan cheese, Romano cheese. I'd get some, and on the way back, I would drive through the main booth, and I'd give the guards these little treats. So, in other words, basically, I was feeding the watchdog. Okay, exactly.

0:52:53 Thomas: Establishing a bit of a rapport and routine.

0:52:56 Ron: So Here it is, I go there and our car is filled up, I got up seven o'clock in the morning that day, I had a little list in a notebook of the things I was going to take and things I could abandon, our car was filled up to the top, and I have a station wagon. And I knew that if, when I went to that booth, if he said, come to the main booth, Ronnie, I was dead. They would physically stopped me. I'd be sequestered from my wife, and we'd undergo interrogation every day, and we'd do labor when we weren't going under the interrogation. Anyway, I got to the booth. I hit the button, and he didn't even ask me what I was doing. He just opened the gate, and I slowly drove through, and I said to Becky, we're turning left, and she says, let's go.

0:52:57 Thomas: Alright.

0:53:46 Ron: I turned left, and my car's a sleeper. It has double overhead cams in it, which is, you can rev up that thing. I was going 70 miles an hour within about 10 seconds. Down the road, and down the road about a mile, there's a road that goes to the right, which will go to Route 10, which'll take you to LA. If I went straight, it would go to route 60, and if I turned left, I'd go into the town of Hammett. I figured once Juergen saw that I turned and left, he'd get on his next hill and say, Ronnie, what the hell are you doing? Ronnie, Ronnie. And then the next thing he'd say, Sal, get up to the boot pronto. Sal would get up from the breakfast table, not knowing what happened, jump in the car, come up to The Boot, and I knew that was enough time for me to get to those three roads.

0:54:33 Ron: I turned left, and I had a rearview mirror that would look about 400 yards. Nobody was following me. We went into Hammett, turned into to the boondocks, and we were free. That's how I escaped.

0:54:46 Thomas: That must have been tense. I mean, how anxious were you during this process?

0:54:49 Ron: It, that That's That's an understatement, tense. I know, this, if I fucked up, well, we've had it, you know, and I didn't, and we made it. Go good, and then we drove across to Wisconsin, my wife's mother's place, this is my second wife, I married a younger woman, and her mother was living in Whitewater. When we drove overcrossed, I didn't use my credit cards to do anything. I paid for everything with cash. I bought meals with cash, we stayed in a motel a couple nights, bought gas, because if you use a credit card, they will trace it, and it'll come right to where you are, and they will spend, spare no expense. They would probably hire a private jet to get where you were to grab me.

0:54:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:55:33 Thomas: He's got resources, that's for sure.

0:55:35 Ron: They're worth several billions of dollars per reports. I don't know this personally, but the people who told me that's, I have complete faith in them, not lying, and yeah, you got resources like that, there's no stops, so we got to a point where, well, we stopped at a Walmart and bought a flip-top phone, by the way, that's the first thing we wanted, well not the first things, we wanted to do that before we got there, and Becky got on the phone, I got to the edge of Wisconsin, I couldn't go any further, I was trashed, so, we had to stay in a motel, but we woke up in the morning, and, Becky called her brother, and said, Donnie, we're coming home. And I heard Donnie yell out, somebody get me a drink. Becky's coming home about.

0:55:38 Thomas: Hey, had mentioned that Becky was always the optimist. I mean, how hard was it to convince her to do this? Was it just because of how bad things had gotten for you? Was she able to understand? And also the risk for her to also assume this risk of being caught. How tough was that?

0:56:32 Ron: Yep. Well, once I said, Becky, we'RE getting out of here. Things had denigrated so bad that she she didn't give me an argument. She's okay. Let's do it.

0:56:40 Thomas: Okay. They were so bad for both of you that you were kind of on the same page.

0:56:41 Ron: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, just, became an intolerable life. It just I couldn't tolerate living that way. I couldn'T if anything, I felt it was going to get worse. And that was the end of it for me. Hey, listen, you know what my biggest cover for leaving was? I was 76 years old and I was the father of the chairman of the board. Nobody would suspect me for leaving. The night before we were leaving, I come out to the car with a mesh bag. You know what a mesh back is where you can see everything inside? Full of shoes and I'm putting it in the car and Sal, one of the security guards, drives by on his motorcycle. Hey, Ronnie, how's it going? It's good, Sal. And I'm putting the things in the car and it was hidden right out in the open because nobody would suspect

0:56:44 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That

0:57:28 Ron: Me of doing this and he's a guy that used to like to work out and I would give him routines because I've always enjoyed different types of exercise and we talked a little about working out and that was it, but earlier there was a guy going into the laundry building. Ronnie, how's it going? Good. And I'm bringing another bag of stuff out. No suspicion whatsoever, none at all.

0:57:51 Thomas: Also leads me to ask you, you had to stay totally quiet about your experience and your displeasure, I'm guessing. I mean, was it just your wife? Was that your only person you were able to trust with this information?

0:58:04 Ron: Exactly, if I told anybody about it and they were Kool-Aid drinkers, as they say, they would have written what's called a knowledge report on me, that's common thing that they do in a CR, you, you rat out people, if somebody says something that's not quite per the party line, you'll say, you know, a knowledge report. Oh, absolutely.

0:58:05 Thomas: Wow. Okay. More totalitarian stuff, man. It's exactly exactly the

0:58:28 Ron: Absolutely. It just, it was just nuts. Anyway, here I am.

0:58:28 Thomas: Same so you yeah you got out, um, what were the consequences? Did you, and, and have you, has David spoken to you in any way, contacted you, asked you anything like that? Okay.

0:58:43 Ron: No, no. Here's what really happened, though, that got me to write the book. Because even after they caught the guys, and when they were interrogating them, by the way, this is the West Allis police, and people can go go on to Tony Ortega's underground bunker site and listen to the, yeah, this is Dwayne Powell and his son, Daniel Powell. You can go on the Tony Ortaga underground bunker sight and listen to the interrogation. Tony has the entire interrogation there. Once this guy realized that he was a little bit in deep shit from having a homemade silencer, he started singing. He just didn't hold back anything and he would say at times, listen, we did not mean to harm the man, we were just wanted to follow him, make sure that he didn't bring up anything, go to the media or anything, but then Daniel tells of a situation that happened when I was in a little town called Janesville, Wisconsin, at a store called Aldi's.

I was grocery shopping, this is in the summertime, I came out to the car with groceries and I had a t-shirt on and it was a pocket t-shirt and I, I had my cell phone in the left-hand T-shirt pocket. You, I go to put the groceries in the car, and I bend over, and I thought the cell phone was going to fall out.

0:59:01 Thomas: This was the guy that was outside your house, okay. Sorry oh wow, yeah

1:00:02 Ron: So I grabbed my left chest with my right arm. These guys were following me, and they were looking at my every move.

1:00:12 Ron: I guess it was Dwayne that said, or Daniel, hey, it looks like our target. They used to call me the target, by the way. Unbelievable. Is going to have a heart attack. What shall we do? So Daniel called in, spoke to his contact, they didn't say anything, he says hang on. So a couple minutes later a guy got on the phone, identified himself as David Miscavige and said, listen, if it's his time to die, let him die, don't intervene, don't do anything. I heard this and you can hear it too. Even with that, I was not going to write a book. Look, I called up, I tried to get in touch with David, and he wouldn't talk to me. He put an attorney on the phone, and the attorney said, David doesn't feel he can trust you. He doesn't want to talk to you.

1:00:57 Ron: What the fuck is this? I'm being followed by guys with rifles, handguns, but he can't trust me? All right, so now, I was talking to my daughters daily when I left. This is in March 2012. And up until about June, and in June, Denise sent me a beautiful Father's Day card. And just after that, we heard no more from her, nor Lori. They disconnected from me.

1:01:03 Thomas: Yeah

1:01:26 Ron: So Becky and I decided we're going to go to Florida, and I'm going to take a CD, and I am going to play this for them, what the PIs were questioning and what they said about David saying. And I felt somehow I could get in communication with them. But they were, as I said, disconnected. That's the policy the church has. If you speak out against them, they will declare you to be a suppressive person. Your friends will disconnect from you. Family members will disconnect. If they don't disconnect, they'll be considered to be suppressive person, and they'll suffer the same thing. If their children work for a Scientology firm, they'd lose their job. Their children wouldn't speak to them. I tell you, it's toxic to say say it's

1:02:08 Thomas: Happened to Chris Shelton as well, my other Scientology guest, he, yeah, his his fiancee totally cut him off. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's horrible policy.

1:02:10 Ron: Yep yep so so now we drove down to Florida and within about 40 miles of Clearwater we start being followed. I was followed by three PIs all the time I was down there. I couldn't catch them to to nail them down. I tried doing it and they escaped from me every time, um, driving over people's lawns to get away from me and just crazy, but anyway, I figure I'm gonna go to see my daughters and I'm gonna play this for them. That is the testimony that the PI said. So I go to Lori's place and I knock on the door and there's no answer and her car's not around. So, I go Denise's house and her husband Jerry comes to the door and opens up the front door by about four inches and there is a dog barking in the background.

Just a real odd scene and I said, "Jerry, I'd like to speak to Denise." She said, "well you can't, she's not here." I said, "well I got to get get in communication with her because this is crazy." He says, "no, you have to go to the church to handle it. Do the standard thing." I said, "Jerry, you're out of your mind. This is going to result in nothing." We went back and forth like that for about 20 minutes.

Finally, I said, "Jerry, what does this mean?" He says, "Ron, Denise and I are through with you and Becky forever." It was at that very moment that decided I'm going to write a book to expose this.

1:02:41 Thomas: Yeah. Were

1:03:33 Ron: That was the turning point in my life, because I knew that no matter what, as long as they were associated with David, he'd have them under his thumb, and I've lost them. How come this book came about.

1:03:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I, I totally understand that. Were you nervous about being, you know, picked up or being, anything happened to you while you were trying to make contact with your daughters?

1:03:58 Ron: No. I've said this in other interviews. I might as well tell you, because I think it's worth saying, and that is this. I developed this attitude when I was in the the Marine Corps. But at that young age, don't forget I joined when I was 17, so I don't know if I could have verbalized this at that age, but I can now. Now, I'll tell you what it is. If you're going to do something where there's some danger involved, you have to disregard the circumstances or the potential circumstances that may be brought about by what you're doing. You got to disregard that and keep concentrating on what you're doing it and why you're doing it. In other words, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

1:04:46 Ron: If You can't do that and you're going to walk around scared all the time, don't do it, man. Just don't do it because you're gonna fail. I'll be honest with you, I really don't give a fuck what they say about me or anything. I want as many people as possible to know what what they're doing. And somewhere along the line, maybe somebody who has some governmental connections will be able to get their tax exemption pulled because that would take the strength away from them. And somehow people may come to their senses and say, well, wait a minute, what the hell am I doing here? Okay. And I tell the whole story in the book and it is worth reading. I can tell you, not just because I wrote it, but because there's a lot of truth in there and it may save some other people. As a matter of fact, I'll tell you another thing as a little little added incentive.

1:04:46 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely.

1:05:33 Ron: At the end of the book, I give references of philosophical writers of the late 1800s, early 1900s, where L. Ron Hubbard got his goodies from. He said in the inside cover of, I forget which book it was, could have been Dianetics, that he studied Socrates, Voltaire, you know, Freud, all these people. No, I don't think he did that at all. You can get these books books on the internet. And if you read them, you're going to get where he got his data from with no agenda. And they cost next to nothing. But the book itself, I think it's worth reading. I really do.

1:06:10 Thomas: I'll, I'll have a link for people, uh, of course in the, in the show notes. Um, how much hope do you have, if any, that maybe your daughters will see this? Maybe they'll be able to break free as well. Or do you think that there's very little chance of that happening?

1:06:26 Ron: Boy, I'll tell you, as the time goes by, I really felt that they've gone over to the dark side. They've been duped completely. And God, I love them. And I wish it hadn't turned out this way, I'll be very frank with you, Thomas, it's just it's a fucking mess, but I'll tell you it's got to be handled and I know one thing, if you're gonna do something like this, you got to keep on going, I'm just gonna keep on trying, maybe someday we can talk again, maybe even David can reform, I don't know, because when you have that much juice and that much power, boy, I'll tell you, it's hard to step down from that, you know, I mean you have people that that will you any desire he has, they'll bring it about. You go there into owning a house in the suburbs and having to work every day for a living, it's a little change-up, my friend, okay? But anyway, you asked me what are the chances of it? Slim.

1:06:39 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:07:03 Thomas: When you're used to things being how they are, I'm sure, yeah?

1:07:23 Thomas: Yeah. Well,

1:07:24 Ron: Yeah, slim.

1:07:25 Thomas: That's really too bad. I am sorry to hear that. I hope somehow they get a, you Google access to or something. I don't know.

1:07:33 Ron: Well, I do too. I do, too. I really do. I hope that someday we could be together again and I could see my grandchildren again, which I had great times with when I was growing up. And my great-grandchildren, I've only met two of them. I don't even know how many there are. I am cut off completely from that. Not good at all. There's no upside to this. And it's done out of pure fucking malice. We're going to show you that we can make your life miserable. Well, guess what? I'm going to show you that I'm going to keep talking, man.

1:07:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

1:08:04 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that is a great note to end on, Ron Miscavige. And the book, Ruthless Scientology, My Son David Miscavaige and Me. Definitely a link in the show notes for anyone interested. It sounds like a very fascinating book. I don't know what to say. It's such an unfortunate thing. It's a horrible thing that your family is being cut off from you like that but who knows, hopefully some fortunate thing will happen and maybe they'll be able to find their way out of it.

1:08:34 Ron: I hope you're right, and I always reserve that little glimmer of hope in my own mind.

1:08:39 Thomas: Well, keep up the good fight thank and you so much for giving me your time here and telling your story and man, so much to reflect on and from the thrilling kind of heist-type escape you had to go through to the situation now. And just thanks for coming on. I really enjoyed it.

1:08:58 Ron: Hey, Thomas, I appreciate you having me on. Okay?

1:09:01 Thomas: All right.

1:09:26 Thomas: Wow, really interesting story. Thank you so much to Ron again for coming on. Jeez, being able to hear from the father of essentially a cult leader about the inner workings and how that went, just incredible. But yeah, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Thank you to all the patrons over at patreon.com slash SeriousPod. Your support is vital to the show. So if you like the show and you feel so inclined, please hop on over to Patreon. On, maybe pledge a buck or two. With that said, I will see you guys on Thursday with another episode of Serious Inquiries Only.