The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of The Church of Scientology by John Duignan with Nicola Tallant, Merlin Publishing, Dublin.
The Scientologists have been doing their damnedest to stop the international publication of John Duignan’s memoir The Complex. Following legal representations, it is no longer possible to buy the book, published in Ireland by Merlin, from Amazon.co.uk. That made me curious, so I had a copy sent direct from Dublin. Here’s my review.
In places, Duignan – a former member of the Church’s elite “Sea Org” – makes the headquarters of Scientology in Hollywood sound truly creepy, like Auschwitz run by Center Parcs. At other times, the fancy dress and antiquated jargon inherited from L Ron Hubbard make one wonder how anyone employed by this “religion” keeps a straight face. I’m still not quite sure which sections of this book the Scientology army of lawyers consider libellous. Perhaps I’m about to find out.
We can pass over the earlier chapters, which consist of a conventional Irish “misery memoir”. John Duignan’s parents died when he was young and he had a wretched childhood. In 1985 he was a young drifter, working for a cleaning company in Germany and smoking lots of pot, when he ran into some Scientologists who ran a personality test that revealed severe problems that could be solved by… well, I think you can guess the answer.
Unable to pay for the expensive “auditing” recommended by the Church, Duignan went to work for it full-time so that he could afford the courses that would lead him to becoming ”Clear”. Eventually he joined the Sea Org, the quasi-naval corps at the heart of the organisation, signing the standard contract for one billion years (to cover future lives). He moved to the Complex, a former hospital in Hollywood that had become the Sea Org’s imposing but shabby HQ. Here he submitted incredibly detailed and personal information about himself for the “ethics files” that (he says) are held on every Scientologist by the Office of Special Affairs, the Church’s “secret police”.
Duignan makes the Complex sound like a Gulag, where the tiniest details of work and play were regulated by the rambling dictates of L Ron Hubbard: even vacuuming a room had to be done as dictated by L Ron, with the machine kept outside the room while the nozzle was inside. Hovering over everyone was “the most feared of all penalties”, being sent to join the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF). RPFers lived in a rat-infested basement, dressed in black and were forced to do “the dirtiest work imaginable”, such as unblocking lavatories, for years at a stretch. Someone serving an RPF sentence could not see his wife or children, says Duignan, and had to address everyone (including children) as “sir”.
Half-way through the book comes a comic set piece. The Scientologists are bussed out to the Hollywood Palladium to be told by Hubbard’s mini-me, David Miscavige, that L Ron had taken the decision that he needed to continue his work unimpeded by his physical body. Some people might call this “dying”, but Scientologists do not take such a negative view. Nor, of course, do Christians, one should add: a Scientologist would be perfectly entitled to point out that its evasive, half-embarrassed announcement of Hubbard’s death is not half as ridiculous as the proclamation that an executed carpenter has come back to life in his tomb.
Still, Duignan has touched a raw nerve here: the Church will not be pleased by his claim that the autopsy on Hubbard showed the presence of the psychiatric drug Vistaril in his system. Psychiatry is pretty much the root of all evil, according to Scientology: at one stage, Duignan describes Miscavige raving about a US psychiatrists’ secret plan to turn a million acres of Alaska into a huge mental health colony. (We are not told whether the state’s Governor would be an administrator or an inmate of this icebound loony bin.)
Anyway, for much of this book, Duignan divides his time between Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead and the HQ in Los Angeles. It’s hard to tell from the writing how bright he is: he was sensible enough to feel like a prat when he was forced to wear his Ruritarian Sea Org uniform in public, but he did stay in for 22 years and I suspect that much of the pace of the narrative comes from his co-author, Nicola Tallant. The Complex is a proper page-turner; even if it’s not clear which passages might form the basis of a lawsuit, you can understand why the Church of Scientology hates the book so much, because its dignity does not survive intact.
What comes across most strongly is a sense of the increasingly accident-prone incompetence of this allegedly sinister organisation. Duignan talks about the mental torture inflicted on some members, but in his own case it sounds as if it was growing awareness of the ridicule surrounding Scientology that drove him out. The year 2005, for example, was one long public relations disaster for the Church, what with the famous South Park episode poking fun at Miscavige, Cruise, Hubbard and the Emperor Xenu, to say nothing of Cruise’s couch-jumping incident on Oprah. Until very recently, Tom Cruise was Scientology’s most prized asset; now he is fast becoming its mad uncle in the attic, gushing crazily on recruitment videos that the Church had to have removed from YouTube this year because they were so embarrassing. If he really is now number two in the organisation, that doesn’t bode well.
Anyone interested in Scientology should read The Complex. I can’t recommend it uncritically, because I came across one fatuous claim that made me wonder about the author’s reliability: at the end of the book he says that the cult-watching group INFORM, based at the LSE, has been infiltrated by the Moonies and the Scientologists, and that the Office of Special Affairs is “involved on their board”. Well, I’m a member of that board, and can assure you that the accusation is total bollocks. I’m also unconvinced by the presentation of Scientology’s LA premises as a Soviet-style prison camp. It may be difficult for an RPFer to walk out of the building, but in no country in the world is the Church allowed to keep its people in custody – which may be why it has rarely (if ever) been convicted of doing so, and why so many of its members rapidly become crusading ex-members once they stumble across all the nonsense about an inter-galactic emperor millions of years ago.
That said, Duignan certainly succeeds in persuading the reader that involvement with the Church of Scientology can be a ghastly and humiliating experience for anyone with an IQ over 75 or an annual income of under $500,000. If you are stupid and rich, however, then sign on the dotted line. You’ll be made to feel very welcome.
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26 responses
Great review - thank you. Can’t wait to get my copy.
I don’t know about INFORM, but I do know that it would not be beyond the Scientologists to co-opt cult watchdog groups. In 1996, after bankrupting the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), individual Scientologists bought the domain name on behalf of the Church of Scientology (see this: http://www.cnn.com/US/9612/19/scientology/index.html) and obtained all the files that CAN kept on various cults. Nowadays, if you visit their website, they do have pages on different cults. But they blame psychiatry for forming these cults, and notably absent from their list is Scientology.
Perhaps an interview with the author will clarify some things about the book.
If this account seems a bit far out, rest assured that it isn’t. As you find out more about it, the “church” of Scientology will always prove to be crazier and more evil than you thought. That is its only stable datum..
Thank you for the very diligent and balanced review of John Duignan’s book, Damian. I am putting this book on my ‘Must Read’ list.
I took the liberty of posting this on Digg. Hopefully, that will help to get the word out about this evil cult.
Link to Digg
You are sceptical of the RPF treatment. I suggest having a read of the RPF orders and the analysis over on wikileaks: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Scientology_cult_unlawful_imprisonment_RPF_order_3434RE_1974 and http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Scientology%27s_prison_system In essence the reason why it is not seen as “imprisonment”, is the people there submit to it because they are there voluntarily, in so far as it’s your only option to save your eternal soul and if you are offloaded (thrown out of the scientology) there is no hope for you. you are, as mentioned so much in the book, a degraded being with no hope for your “thetan”.
given the apparent links between INFORM and CESNUR it could well be reasonable for the author to be suspicious given the glowing account that CESNUR give on the RPF, where their fact finding mission took place while he was at Saint Hill, which he saw as a sham.
ex-scientology members have told stories of armed teams patroling RPF compounds - they track down and ‘bring back’ escaped RPF members. Oh, and people in the RPF have died there of lack of medical attention… it think the other commenters have the links to point in that direction
A fair review and you’re right to be skeptical about the RPF treatment as well as the infiltration of INFORM. As far as the RPF treatment is concerned, what John told in the book mirrors may other testemonies. While this is a great insight in to the cult and how it works on its members it is not the most dramatic story I’ve read by people who have escaped; you should start reading the stories on Ex-Scientolgists message board or Ex-Scientology kids for that matter.
Regarding the infiltration of INFORM, being on the board you obviously know what’s what, but don’t be complacent, aside from putting down Hubbard OSA operatives will do or say anything to get in favour with an enemy.
It’s worse than you suggest. Not only Amazon.co.uk but so far as we can tell every bookseller in the UK is refusing to sell ‘The Complex’. Many villains are no doubt wishing they had the scary reputation of the Church of Scientology!
The ‘claim’ about Vistaril amounts to the Coroner’s report, still available direct, and an official acknowledgment that it is correct by the Church. What more do you want?
Yes he’s wrong about INFORM, though stories wondering about its less than robust attitude to cults have been circulating for a long while, largely due to its involvement with CESNUR, an organisation which is decidedly cult apologetic. Like most of academia, INFORM gives the appearance of seeking dialogue with cults but not with their critics.
The ‘custody’ in RPF is not just physical. It is also mental custody, of the kind that led David Koresh’s followers to burn to death at Waco when they also could have walked out.
The Co$ may not be on the INFORM board, but don’t let that fool you… They’d love to be. This is the same organisation that sued the US “Cult Awareness Network” out of existence and then took it over, turning it into yet another front group.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, the RPF is no exaggeration. Gold Base, Hemet, CA is a fortified compoud, with big gates and barbed wire; where people like Uwe Stuckenbrock can be worked into an early grave, all the while thinking that they somehow ‘deserve’ what they’re going through.
It is difficult to fully undersand and accept when hearing about the RPF and slave labour camps for the first time. But in regards to Scientology, it is in fact true. Remember the old adage ‘truth is stranger than fiction’. I recommend you read Counterfeit Dreams by former Scientologist Jeff Hawkins here: http://counterfeitdreams.blogspot.com/ and watch ‘Missing in Happy Valley’, a documentary done by German television about the RPF. Part one is here: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=kPVZZvM0R9U and the links to the rest are in the sidebar.
Just remember - because it sounds exagerated or insane doesn’t necessarily make it untrue. Truth is stranger than fiction.
A lot of what John Duignan writes in this book is just a 1:1 copy of the rumours that are spread on the Internet about Scientology on bigot sites like xenu.net .
John Duignan is just another bigot that jumped on the bandwagon of the hategroup Anonymous to make a profit.
Well, Tom. I haven’t told my story but it would sound very similar to some of what Duignan’s reporting after my 30 years on staff, 4 RPF assignments and unreal abuse observed first hand. Scientologists “in the field” can go ahead and trust all the wonderful PR the church makes you believe and never question the blatent outnesses sitting right in front of your face. I know many people have a low confront of evil and reject anything negative said about what they truly believe in. That’s a pretty “theetie-weetie” way to live, however as one could make the wrong decisions without being properly informed.
Wow Damian. If you find the RPF and infiltration of opposition groups by scientology a bit far-fetched, you really haven’t done your homework properly.
Regarding whether Scientology can hold members against their will: former RPFers (e.g. Jesse Prince, Stacy Brooks and Hanna Eltringham) have said that it can and does. When these people left Scientology, they did not simply walk out the front door. They had to plan their escape just as one would plan an escape from a police state. Lisa McPherson and Martine Boublil, likewise, were not in situations where they could simply walk away.
How does the organization manage to do this? By keeping it behind closed doors. That’s all it takes, apparently.
There is, of course, some legal hand-waving. Management obtains a signature that the person agrees to the RPF, and then that becomes a blank check for whatever it decides to do with them.
The law might say that this _should_ not happen and that the governments _should_ act, but laws do not jump out of the law books and enforce themselves.
I note that the link to this book review, and indeed all the other posts on scientology have been deleted from Damian Thompson’s blog.
Err, I was in the Sea Org, and I have to say that what keeps people imprisoned is
1. Lack of money
2. Lack of real world skills
3. The only “education” they get is Hubbard education
Scientology has an elaborate system of effecting mental change, where people are progressively brought more and more in line with the “group think”. Scientology has it’s own dictionary for it’s own pseudo language that pulls people into it’s false reality.
Look if hypnotists can get people to hand over their wallet on the street and take blank paper instead of money, why is it so hard to believe that a religion can manipulate people? Especially when the “church” ships people all around, usually far from their family and encourages them to “disconnect” with very harsh methods from their families.
But don’t let the truth stop you, believe the PR from the church instead.
I too would like to make a few comments about Damian’s review.
Firstly he links the dropping of the body by LRH to the historic claim of Christianity that Jesus rose from the dead. He writes, “one should add: a Scientologist would be perfectly entitled to point out that its evasive, half-embarrassed announcement of Hubbard’s death is not half as ridiculous as the proclamation that an executed carpenter has come back to life in his tomb.”
Making claims is the easy part, however, from the next paragraph it is clear that Duignan shows that the death of LRH was stage managed and the official version was untrue. Over the last 2000 years many have qualified, reinterpreted or denied the resurrection. Dr. Frank Morrison (a rationalistic lawyer) decided to take three years off from his practice to disprove the resurrection. After three years of study, he found that the sheer weight of the evidence compelled him to conclude that Jesus actually did rise from the dead. As a consequence he wrote the book: Who Moved the Stone?
To place historic Christianity in the context of this deranged impostor is seriously troubling. Certainly be sceptical about JC, but give us a break by not linking LRH with him.
Damian is fair in proposing that this book is a must for those interested in Scientology, but for obvious reasons can’t agree to John’s analysis of Inform. “Anyone interested in Scientology should read The Complex. I can’t recommend it uncritically, because I came across one fatuous claim that made me wonder about the author’s reliability: at the end of the book he says that the cult-watching group INFORM, based at the LSE, has been infiltrated by the Moonies and the Scientologists, and that the Office of Special Affairs is “involved on their board””.
As the person who John requested help from in leaving Scientology I may be able to shed some light as others above me have already. Clearly a cursory look at the inform web site shows that this is wrong. I would hope that the next edition of the book would remove that sentence. However, as someone who has known Eileen Barker and the various people around Inform I would have to say that the sociological methodology employed by Inform has given victims/ ex cultists the sense that they are just taking one point of view and the group is as entitled to be treated as an equal dialogue partner. They feel betrayed by this so called objectivity and read it as sleeping with the enemy. In other sense the methodology of engagement used by Inform is too weighted to maintaining contacts with the group in question rather than being an advocate for the person who in this case is a walking encyclopaedia of what is really happening. The idea behind this is when you have a pastoral case to address you can call on the moral capital you have accumulated with the group to address the issues involved with a someone seeking to leave the group. In 2001 following the CESNUR Conference at the LSE and a visit some of us made to Sainthill, it was my impression that when I asked Eileen to mediate with Graham Wilson of Scientology in regard to horrendous literature being sent out about me, I formed the opinion Eileen was too close to the Scientologists to affect any solution. Here I mean close refers to neutrality of an academic nature. She could not name what was happening as wrong. Also her hero Bryan Wilson produced a document indicating that Scientology was a religion based on his visits to East Grinstead. I had a prolonged correspondence with him where I asked how he could lend his name to a document on the Scientology web site which had not gone under academic scrutiny or peer review. Also John shows how Scientologists were able to totally take Gordon Melton for a ride in regard to his naive view that the Sea Org was like a religious order in Christianity, and the RPF was some kind of intensive course for the really committed. He is regular speaker at the Inform conferences, and they only have speakers who represent the party line of no brainwashing, and low risk nature of NRM’s.
Another person who represents this trend is Michael York of Bath. He did a study of the RPF, but he actually broke the most basic ethics of research by naming the people he used for his interviews. Instead of using letters or numbers he actually named well known Irish Scientologists and mentioned their sexual misconduct. So for someone like John turning to such people would represent a danger. A sense that the person did not really get it. They are about a relativistic methodology which minimises their experience of brainwashing- for bingo brainwashing does not exist. John’s book is a text book on how you brainwash, and the North Koreans would be very impressed. Also under what kind of conditioning did the 7/7 and Glasgow bombers operate. Damian can’t see the terrible nature and gulag which is Scientology, firstly due to his not being sure about John’s reliability, and secondly because Inform reject the idea that groups can do terrible things that poison the mind. As to Nicola Tallant directing the book, I found her stamp being her ability to get John to express himself. Inform tends to minimise the extreme nature of these groups resulting in people in need viewing this type of academic response as not being what they need.
Also it is my experience that those that join groups are often idealistic and more intelligent than normal whether poor or rich, rather than, “If you are stupid and rich, however, then sign on the dotted line. You’ll be made to feel very welcome.”
Mike Garde
Director of Dialogue Ireland
Dublin
Tom Newton Wins is a scientologist doing the “church’s” dirty work.
As an ex Sea Org Member and a fomer RPF’er i have to congratulate john duignan on his book and i wish to god i only had the courage to write one myself, I eventually got out of Scientology over 15 years ago and by god i could tell a few home truths about their evilness and corrupt doings as I, saw most of it as i was an Officer in the Org at Saint hill Manor. John Duignan is a true gentleman and i am glad that he “got out the other end” and is now rebuilding his life
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