Refund and Reparation

From: SME < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it >
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: For The Record – Larry Brennan Recent Communication
Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 17:30:20 -0700 (PDT)

In order to make this public, I am reposting something I just posted
at www.enturbulation.org as follows:

Last week, John Roberts of CNN grilled Tommy Davis, a Scientology spokesman, who was predictably evasive about what L. Ron Hubbard’s wacky minions are up to. ‘Disconnection,’ the church policy of splitting up families in order to shun critics of the church? Never happens, Davis claimed. And as for that high-priced stuff about removing alien souls with lie detector machines? “It’s unrecognizable to me,” Davis told Roberts.

But it was Davis himself who was practically unrecognizable, Jason Beghe tells the Voice.

Beghe is Scientology’s most notorious recent defector, a veteran film and television actor who, after twelve years and approximately $1 million spent on the religion, defected in spectacular manner with a web video in which he denounced Scientology as “destructive and a rip-off.”

Davis, meanwhile, is the son of another Scientology celebrity, actress Anne Archer. He’s a longtime Hubbardite himself, and helped to run the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles. Davis told Rolling Stone in 2006 that L. Ron Hubbard was “the coolest guy ever.” Davis is also well known for provoking BBC journalist John Sweeney into a temper tantrum that became a YouTube hit last year.

Beghe, however, has more personal memories of the man.

“On the day I was getting married, I was waiting in my house with David Duchovny, my best man, and everything was fine. Then about an hour before I had to go, I started to get nervous. I don’t drink much, so I don’t have much to drink in the house. So I called Tommy Davis and he brought me a cold six-pack.”

And there was also this: “I had a terrible car accident,” Beghe says.

“I was in a coma for three and a half weeks. Either Tommy or someone else from Celebrity Centre was with me for that entire time.”

“I know this guy,” Beghe says.

And that’s why Davis’s appearance on CNN was so troubling, Beghe explains.

“He was saying there’s no Disconnection. That’s a fucking lie. I’m not even a declared suppressive person, and they’ve all disconnected from me,” Beghe says about his former friends in the church. “They kicked my four-year-old son out of a fucking Scientology school. There’s your church.”
[...]
Full article: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/...

Eric Rubio thought he would become happy and important in Scientology. Instead the cult left this inadequate and solitary man to starve to death in a foreign country.

Eric Rubio died in Denmark in January 2002, aged 35. He was a simple soul, who found many things in life rather difficult. He had got involved with Scientology ten years earlier when living with his father in Paris and, like many more intelligent people, found it an exciting experience. His mother, another inadequate soul, at first
thought that her son had got involved with a religious organization and by the time she knew enough to warn Eric, it was too late. Worse, she was defined as an SP or suppressive (critical) person, and Eric, who had so few resources, had to choose between his mother and the cult. Up to 1991 he continued to work at various jobs in Paris, then in 1992 moved to Denmark to join the Sea Org. His mother found that
his few letters seemed to come from a distant person she found difficult to recognize.

In 1994 he wrote that he was disillusioned with the Sea Org: he had to work very hard, live in dreadful conditions, and was paid almost nothing. It seems likely that Eric never progressed beyond the initial punitive phase as a member of the EPF (Estates Project Force), who are used as slave labor in building projects and in maintenance prior to being promoted to the elite Sea Org. It also seems likely that the brutal treatment had serious long-term effects on his physical health
and mental stability. At any rate he felt in 1994 that he had wasted two years of his life and planned to return to France. However it is not so easy to get out of Scientology. Eric needed a birth certificate to get new ID papers from the French embassy and wrote to ask his mother to send this document. She did, but it did not arrive. So Eric wrote again and his mother again responded, anxious to do anything to help, but he never got her letters. It is known from other sources that letters and other communications between Sea Org members and their suppressive families are monitored and censored or suppressed.

In 1997 Eric was declared an SP and unfit to be a member of the Sea Org. In fact it appears that his health had given way. This meant that he lost his accommodation with the Sea Org, poor though it was, and had to fend for himself in a foreign country. For a while he worked in a restaurant and as an office cleaner, and moved from one address to another but he began to fail both physically and mentally. He developed cataracts and hyperparathyroidism. His mind became confused, his behavior increasingly violent, and he couldn't hold down a job and had to rely on state assistance. Besides all this he was entirely alone in Denmark and never learned to speak Danish. He reduced his diet to vegetables and finally to onions and garlic.

Events of the last year or so of his life are not clear. In October 2000 he was very ill but apparently wrote to the Copenhagen organization applying to rejoin. The main outcome of this appears to have been a demand for the repayment of imaginary course fees. More certainly they were still trying to sell him expensive (and useless) books. From 2000 to his death he paid $132 to the CoS every month out of his social payments of $700. The CoS, shameless as ever in the face of yet another 'black PR' disaster, say that Eric made only one payment Anette Refstrup, a leading Danish Scientologist, also made the incredible claim that 'No-one is obliged to stay [in Scientology] if they don't want to. It would be impossible to keep people here against their will'. Those who know how Scientology works will know how true this is.

On 9 November 2001, hoping still for a solution to his very real problems, Eric Rubio used his last money to pay for a course at the Yoga school. Then he stopped going out and, by then completely deranged, tried to live on nothing but water and garlic. His social worker, worried about his lack of contact, cut off his benefit, expecting him to respond when he ran out of money. But he did not. Instead on January 15 2002 he was found dead in his clean but empty kitchen in his clean but empty flat. He weighed only 45 kilos (90 pounds), about half the normal weight for his height (1.67m). He had been trying to get home to his mother in France for more than seven years.

During those seven years many Danish people helped him to the best of their ability, but Scientology, which was responsible for bringing him to Copenhagen, was only concerned with recovering the money he allegedly owed them and with increasing his debts. They had exploited him as long as he was fit and otherwise had no interest in him. Eric Rubio was not stupid - he was naturally a happy person - but he was defenseless against such heartless exploitation.

Sources
Cyril Malka 'Starved to Death in Denmark' 2002 ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) Jakob Rubin 'Eric Rubio, scientologue francais, mort de faim au Danemark', www.antisectes.net

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