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The Hole is a facility reportedly operated by the Church of Scientology in Riverside County, California in which dozens of its senior executives have been "imprisoned" for months or years. It is located at Gold Base (also known as Int Base), a 500 acres (200 ha) compound used by the senior management of the Church, which also houses the Church's in-house film studio Golden Era Productions. The Hole consists of a set of double-wide trailers joined together to form a suite of offices which had formerly been used by the Church's international management team. From 2004 to at least 2010, the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige is reported to have sent dozens of senior Scientology executives to The Hole. It became, as the Tampa Bay Times put it in a January 2013 article,

a place of confinement and humiliation where Scientology's management culture — always demanding — grew extreme. Inside, a who's who of Scientology leadership went at each other with brutal tongue lashings, and even hands and fists. They intimidated each other into crawling on their knees and standing in trash cans and confessing to things they hadn't done. They lived in degrading conditions, eating and sleeping in cramped spaces designed for office use.

The executives confined at The Hole are reported to have numbered up to 100 of the most senior figures in Scientology's management, including the Church of Scientology International's President, Heber Jentzsch. Individuals are said to have spent months or even years there. After a few managed to escape The Hole and Scientology, they gave accounts of their experiences in The Hole to the media, the courts and the FBI, leading to widespread publicity about the harsh conditions that they had allegedly endured. The Church of Scientology has denied those accounts. It says that "The Hole does not exist and never has" and states that nobody had been held against their will. However, it admits that its members are subjected to "religious discipline, a program of ethics and correction entered into voluntarily as part of their religious observances."

Physical punishment in Scientology

Senior managers in the Church of Scientology are members of the Sea Org, an elite group within the Church that was established by its founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1967. Its members sign a billion-year contract that commits them to pursuing the organisational goals of Scientology for a minimal level of compensation. It is said to consist of five to seven thousand Scientologists. They are subject to a rigid code of discipline known as "Ethics" which is administered by Ethics Officers (as a 1960s Scientology magazine put it, "No one can fool a Sea Org Ethics Officer. He knows who's ethics bait."). Violations of Ethics can lead to punishments administered by a body called the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), which has been compared to the "Re-education through labor" system in Communist China. Such punishments, which can last for months or years, typically consist of a regime of physical labor and lengthy daily confessions of "evil purposes".

According to Scientology's spokesman Tommy Davis, the Sea Org is a "crew of tough sons of bitches. The Sea Org is not a democracy. The members of it agree with a man named L. Ron Hubbard. They abide by his policies . . . and we follow it to the T, to the letter, to the punctuation marks. And if you disagree with that and you don't like it, you don't belong. Then you leave." Former Scientologist Jon Atack comments that most Sea Org members are conditioned to accept such treatment out of devotion to Hubbard and Scientology: "The Sea Org saw themselves as the elite, the chosen few, who would return life after life to rejoin their leader in the conquest of suffering."

Physical punishment (which Scientology describes as "ecclesiastical discipline") has been part of the management practices of the Sea Org since its start. Hubbard ordered erring members – some said to have been as young as five years old – to be imprisoned for days at a time in the chain lockers or bilge tanks of his flagship, the former Irish Sea cattle ferry Royal Scotman (later Apollo) that he had made his temporary home. They were reported to have been supplied oxygen via tubes and ate out of communal food buckets while sitting or standing in filthy bilge water, without the benefit of bathroom facilities, for days on end. Three Scientologists were reported to have been ordered to race each other around the rough surface of the ship's wooden decks while pushing peanuts with their noses. According to an eyewitness, by the time the race ended "they all had raw, bleeding noses, leaving a trail of blood behind them."

Other Scientologists were thrown over the side of the ship in a practice dubbed "overboarding"; sometimes they were bound and blindfolded before being tossed overboard. Scientology spokesmen have defended this practice as "a Sea Org ritual akin to traditions in other religious orders" and "part of ecclesiastical justice." Norman Starkey, the former captain of the Apollo, said that if a Sea Org member makes a mistake, "you throw him over the goddamn side of the ship. He falls into the water, he swims around, climbs up the ladder, gets off at the dock, walks back in again. He never does that again. He knows that that is the way we operate. That is what the Sea Organization is like." Some Scientology churches (or "orgs") adopted a land-based version of overboarding by making staff members stand against a wall while other Scientologists threw buckets of water at them, but the practice was largely abandoned in the 1970s. Long after Hubbard's death in 1986, his successor David Miscavige reintroduced overboarding at Scientology's international management center, Gold Base (also known as Int Base) in Riverside County, California. Staff members were ordered out of doors in the middle of the night to go to the base's swimming pool or its muddy lake, often in freezing conditions. They would then jump or be pushed into the water while fully clothed. According to one staffer, Miscavige "seemed to enjoy the spectacle; he'd often watch officials submerge themselves and resurface, freezing, while he sipped tea or cocoa, wearing a fuzzy bathrobe."

Musical chairs

The use of arbitrary punishments at Miscavige's orders is said to have escalated from 2003 onwards, when he became increasingly frustrated at what he saw as the failures of many of Scientology's senior executives. Meetings became tense affairs punctuated by "profane, belittling rants". According to emails said to have come from Miscavige's "Communicator" – the personal assistant responsible for passing on transcribed messages from the leader – he routinely berated subordinates with terms such as "CSMF" (for "Cock Sucking Mother Fucker" and "YSCOHB" ("You Suck Cock On Hollywood Boulevard"). John Brousseau, the estate manager at Int Base and a veteran Sea Org member, said that Miscavige repeatedly faulted his subordinates' work, "constantly berating them, nitpicking everything they're doing, pointing out inadequacies, ineffectiveness, lack of results, blaming it all on them and their inability to do anything right, and on the other hand saying how he's got to do everything himself – he's the only one who can do anything right."

According to author Janet Reitman, in the late fall of 2004 Miscavige called together 70 senior executives in the management conference room at Int Base and ordered them to play a game of musical chairs to save their jobs. Those who failed to get a chair when the music stopped would be "offloaded" from the base, being sent away from their spouses and children to languish in the most remote and unpleasant locations in Scientology's empire. As Queen's Greatest Hits was played, the competition for seats became increasingly fierce: "By the time the number had dwindled to twenty, people were throwing one another against the walls, ripping seats from one another's hands, wrestling one another to the floor." At the end of the contest, Miscavige ordered that all the executives were to stay in the conference room and sleep under the tables until further notice. They stayed there for the next few days, with occasional deliveries of food, before being released.

In due course Miscavige's disgruntlement with his colleagues led to a full-scale purge. Hundreds of staffers were sent to the RPF while dozens of others were offloaded. Various senior executives were accused of being "suppressive persons" – enemies of Scientology – and were confined to the double-wide trailers formerly used as the international management team's offices, which had been erected in the 1990s. Miscavige ordered them to do the "A to E steps", a set of penances intended to demonstrate that the "suppressive" has repented and reformed; in particular, they were to confess their "twisted little secrets" and identify which of them were "defying him and sabotaging Scientology with their incompetence". The facility, formerly known as "the CMO Int trailer", became known as the "A to E Room," the "SP Hole," and ultimately simply "The Hole."

Life in The Hole

Over the next three years, the number of people confined in The Hole increased from 40 to up to 100. They slept in cots or sleeping bags, squeezed into every available floor space or on desktops. Men would sleep around the conference table while women slept in cubicles and small offices around the main conference room. They were so crowded that there was barely any room to move: "Everyone sleeping with only about six inches on either side. Above you. Below you. Getting up in the middle of the night, you'd disturb everyone." They were only allowed to leave to attend Church events or to be taken to a shower in a nearby maintenance garage, to which they were taken two at a time under guard. Food was brought to them on golf carts from the Int Base mess hall, as the executives were not allowed to eat with the rest of the staff, and they were only given ten to fifteen minutes to eat. According to one of the executives, the food was "like leftovers, slop, bits of meat, soupy kind of leftovers thrown into a pot and cooked and barely edible." The building was said to be infested with ants and on several occasions the electricity was turned off, causing the temperature inside to reach 106 °F (41 °C) due to the lack of air conditioning.

John Brousseau commented that when he visited The Hole occasionally, "you could smell that people live here, people sleep here." He saw the executives being marched elsewhere on the base to take showers; his impression was that "they looked like they were being marched to the gallows – they just looked lifeless, with no purpose. Very hang-dog, droopy shoulders, slouchy, very sad, inward-looking creatures." He said that they were only allowed out "at certain times of day that would be adjudicated to be the least likely time when DM would run into them if he was on the property. They would march out to Old Gilman House to take a shower and come back because they had no shower facilities inside The Hole. Later that got upgraded to let them go down to the garage." Sometimes executives were allowed out for a short time to attend Church events, but many ended up spending months or even years in The Hole.

Those reportedly held in The Hole represented a who's who of Scientology's top management. They included Debbie Cook, the head of the Church of Scientology Flag Service Organization; Heber Jentzsch, the President of the Church of Scientology International; Guillaume Lesevre, the Executive Director International and the church's top management official; Mark Rathbun, the Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center; Wendell Reynolds, the International Finance Director; Mike Rinder, the Commanding Officer of the Office of Special Affairs; Norman Starkey, the former captain of Hubbard's ship, the Apollo; and Marc Yager, the Commanding Officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization.

According to executives who eventually escaped from The Hole, its occupants were forced to practice group confessions in which they would confess supposed transgressions against Miscavige, bad thoughts that they had had about Scientology and disclose their sexual fantasies. Debbie Cook, who spent seven weeks in The Hole in 2007, said that "most of the time the activities were either you confessing your own sins or bad things that you'd done, or getting other people to confess theirs." Mike Rinder commented on the bizarre personal dynamics of The Hole: "These were your friends, people you had traveled with. But then, you get in the Hole? You can't trust anybody."

Rinder told the Tampa Bay Times that interrogations "would be carried out by whoever happened to be there – 20 people, 30 people, 50 people, all standing up and screaming at you, and ultimately it sort of devolved into physical violence, torture, to extricate these "confessions" out of people." According to Rinder, the confessions were sometimes dictated by Miscavige, but more usually the inmates of The Hole would force each other to confess: "The 50 people there are all screaming at me, telling me I've got to confess – I've done that, why don't I just admit it? I stole money, I had affairs – people would just literally dream up bullshit and start screaming it out, and then the mob goes crazy: "Oh yeah, it must have been that!"." Tom De Vocht, who was also in The Hole, recalled that "everybody in that damned room — people are wild and out of control, I punched somebody. Everybody was punched. And screaming and yelling. It just got like, 'What the hell is going on here?'" De Vocht rationalized his own involvement on the grounds of self-defense: "If I don't attack I'm going to be attacked. It's a survival instinct in a weird situation that no one should be in."

The pressure evidently worked, as Rinder wrote an "Apology and Announcement" on June 4, 2005 in which he told Miscavige, "I recognise very clearly how Treasonous I have been towards you and Scientology." He subsequently commented that such written confessions "read like North Korean POW writeups," alluding to the way that Korean War POWs detained in North Korea were forced to go through brainwashing to renounce their "reactionary imperialist" mindset. He explained to the Tampa Bay Times why people did not simply walk out of The Hole: "If you leave you are going to lose contact with your family and any friends who are Scientologists. You have it pounded into you the whole time that the only reason someone leaves a group like that is because they are bad, that you have done something that force you to have to leave." He noted people had invested a great deal of themselves in Scientology, that Sea Org members have "made a commitment beyond even a single lifetime" and that the prevailing attitude was that "'I've lived through many lifetimes and there are lots of experiences that I've had that are far worse than this, so I can put up with this and I can stand it'."

Conditions in The Hole reportedly worsened in 2006 after several executives had escaped. Security was tightened to prevent the confined executives from "blowing". John Brousseau says that he was ordered to fasten steel bars across the doors of the building and the windows were modified so that they could only be opened a few inches. Another staff member objected, pointing out that any outsider could see the bars. They were removed after a few weeks, but the building was guarded around the clock to prevent further escapes. The Church of Scientology denies that bars were ever installed, saying, "Any allegation of bars being installed to hold people against their will is false and malicious and is denied." Church spokesman Tommy Davis has said that "the goddamn front door wasn't locked. And if they had a problem with it they could have walked out."

From 2006, according to Rinder, executives undergoing "group confessions" were made to stand in big trash cans in the middle of the floor with signs around their necks on which various derogatory statements were written. Rinder described how it became "relatively routine" for people to be "slapped, punched, kicked, pushed, shoved, thrown up against the wall" in order to make them confess. He told the Tampa Bay Times that he and other people were made to continuously crawl around a conference room table with their trouser legs rolled up, getting kicked from behind if they stopped, which resulted in them suffering severely contused and abraded knees after days of such treatment. There was an escalation in the level of confessions demanded, such that they became "more and more dramatic and over the top in order to be acceptable." He described how one executive was made to sit under an air vent with the cooling system turned up high, while cold water was poured over his head. After an hour or so, he was "shaking so uncontrollably and his lips were so completely blue that he was incapable of talking". (The executive in question denied to the Tampa Bay Times that this incident had ever happened).

Debbie Cook testified in a San Antonio court in 2012 that she had been on the phone to Miscavige when two Scientologists crawled in through her office window and seized her, conveying her to The Hole. She said that she had subsequently been "put in a trash can, cold water poured over , slapped." According to Mark Rathbun, who was also in The Hole at the time, for twelve hours "Debbie was made to stand in a large garbage can and face one hundred people screaming at her demanding a confession as to her "homosexual tendencies". While this was going on, water was poured over her head. Signs were put around Debbie's neck, one marked in magic marker "LESBO" while this torture proceeded. Debbie was repeatedly slapped across the face by other women in the room during the interrogation. Debbie never did break."

Cook told the court that another Scientology executive, who had not been sent to The Hole, had objected to what he had seen there on a visit. According to Cook, the executive was given a two-hour beating and ordered to lick a bathroom floor for at least 30 minutes. She testified that Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre, two of Scientology's most senior executives, were pressured to state that they had had a homosexual affair and were beaten until they "confessed". According to another executive, Tom De Vocht, Miscavige pushed Yager to the ground and told a black executive, "By the way, thinks black people are niggers, and he doesn't want Scientology to help blacks. Go kick him.' So is down on the ground and she's kicking him." Both Yager and the other executive have denied this account.

Escaping from The Hole

Mark Rathbun spent only four days in The Hole in 2004 but says that he left after seeing his old friend Tom De Vocht being physically beaten by Miscavige. The incarcerated executives were ordered one night to jog to a building 400 yards away and back. As they were herded back to their office-prison, Rathbun broke away and hid in bushes until the group had disappeared from sight. He retrieved his motorcycle, hid in the brush and drove out through the Int Base gates when they were opened to let a car in. He subsequently rented a car and spent a month touring the South before settling in southern Texas.

De Vocht left Scientology in May 2005 after he was allegedly attacked by Miscavige. According to De Vocht, he told his wife – a Miscavige aide – that he would fight back if it happened again. He was subsequently declared to be a "Suppressive Person" and announced his intention to leave. The compound's guard refused to open the gate, so he climbed the fence and walked to Hemet, six miles away. He was later sent a $98,000 "Freeloader Bill" by the Church.

Mike Rinder spent almost two years in The Hole between 2004 and 2007, leaving it occasionally to deal with public relations matters such as dealing with the BBC journalist John Sweeney's 2007 documentary Scientology and Me. According to Rinder, Miscavige was furious with the way that Sweeney had been handled. Rinder was ordered to go to Sussex to dig ditches on a Church property there but defected instead, eventually settling in Denver.

Debbie Cook left The Hole in May 2007 after spending seven weeks there, when she was sent back to Clearwater, Florida to organize a major public event involving Miscavige. She was driven to downtown Clearwater by another staff member, along with her husband, to eat at the Church's dining hall. The couple took the opportunity to escape Scientology when the staff member went inside to get breakfast; Cook jumped into the driver's seat, drove with her husband to the nearest car rental outlet and hired a car to drive up to her father's house in North Carolina. Before they got there, they were intercepted by Church officials and ordered to return to Clearwater. She spent three weeks under guard, at one point writing in a letter to her mother that if she was not released she "would take whatever steps necessary, like slitting my wrists", before finally signing a severance agreement. She later said that by that point, "I would have signed that I stabbed babies over and over again and loved it".

John Brousseau was not sent to The Hole, but what he saw of it made him decide to leave Scientology in 2010 after 33 years in the Church. He was struck by how "dozens of these people , they were just so alive, but I looked at them now and they were just husks. They wouldn't say or originate anything, they seemed to have no purpose, they were just like sheep. There's no way 100 people could be evil horrid and DM's the only one. No way." He had known and been friends with some of those in The Hole for decades and could not bear what he was seeing. As he put it, "I can't stop it, but I can at least stop supporting it. So I left."

Exposing The Hole

From 2009, several former church executives began to speak out about The Hole, both to the media and to the FBI, who were investigating potential human trafficking offences by the Church of Scientology. (The investigation was later called off.) Rathbun wrote in the New York Daily News in July 2012 that he had "decided that had to speak out before someone was killed in The Hole". In June 2009, the Tampa Bay Times published a series of articles on the internal workings of the Church of Scientology titled "The Truth Rundown", detailing accounts of beatings and other episodes of violence between Miscavige and other top Scientology executives. The Times followed up in January 2013 with a detailed account of The Hole, supplemented by interviews with defectors from Scientology, while The Village Voice sought to compile a list of the executives said to have been incarcerated there. ABC News also reported on Debbie Cook's account of The Hole.

According to John Brousseau, the bad publicity led to reforms of The Hole. Its inmates were allowed to sleep in proper beds in the "Berthing" quarters elsewhere in the compound. Brousseau describes their new seven-days-a-week routine starting when "they got up, showered, then went to the dining hall at 9:30. They had 30 minutes for breakfast. Then they walked up to the Hole. They sat down at desks. I have no clue what work they did. They worked until 12:30 or 1 pm. Then they were marched back to the dining hall and had 30 minutes for lunch. Then they were marched back to The Hole and were there until 6 pm." After a 30-minute dinner, they were taken to the study hall and stayed there "for two and a half hours, until about 9:30. Then they went to the Hole again to wrap up their day. At 11 or midnight, they'd get marched back to Berthing." Some of the restrictions on contacting people outside The Hole were also said to have been eased. However, other Church staff were still encouraged to avoid contact with the inmates: "You didn't talk to them, you looked the other way, you'd leave the area if you saw them, it's like the black plague." Brousseau commented: "You stayed away from these people. They're considered the worst of the worst."

The Church did not answer detailed questions about The Hole put to it by the Tampa Bay Times and denied interviews to both the Times and ABC News. A Church lawyer told ABC News that "The Hole does not exist and never has". The Church did admit that Debbie Cook and others had "participate in religious discipline, a program of ethics and correction entered into voluntarily as part of their religious observances," but insisted that "the idea that the church held her or anyone else against their will denied" and also denied Debbie Cook's description of The Hole. It told The New Yorker in 2011 that "There is not, and never has been, any place of 'confinement' . . . nor is there anything in Church policy that would allow such confinement."

References

1. ^ Tobin, Thomas C; Childs, Joe (January 13, 2013). "Scientology defectors describe violence, humiliation in "the Hole"". Tampa Bay Times.
2. ^ Harris, Dan (February 29, 2012). "Another PR Crisis for Scientology". ABC News.
3. Bromley 2009, p. 99.
4. Atack 1990, p. 186
5. Kent 2001, p. 112
6. ^ Tobin, Thomas C; Childs, Joe (June 23, 2009). "Scientology: Ecclesiastical justice". Tampa Bay Times.
7. Atack 1990, p. 181
8. Atack 1990, p. 180
9. Seligman, Craig (January 14, 2013). "Scientology Plays Cupid for Tom Cruise, Wright Says". Bloomberg News.
10. Atack 1990, p. 186
11. Reitman 2011, p. 93
12. Reitman 2011, p. 326
13. Ortega, Tony (January 9, 2013). "BBC Newsman John Sweeney's Book Calls Scientology's 'Pope' a Foul-Mouthed Bully". The Huffington Post.
14. Reitman 2011, p. 339
15. Reitman 2011, p. 340
16. ^ Ortega, Tony (August 2, 2012). "Scientology's Concentration Camp for Its Executives: The Prisoners, Past and Present". The Village Voice.
17. ^ Ortega, Tony (April 4, 2012). "Mike Rinder on "The Hole," Indoctrination, Confessions, and His Ultimate Escape". The Village Voice.
18. ^ Tobin, Maurice; Childs, Joe; Rivenbark (January 13, 2013). "Suppressed: John Brousseau - Outcasts". Tampa Bay Times. {{cite news}}: More than one of |first1= and |first= specified (help)
19. ^ Tobin, Thomas C; Childs, Joe (June 21, 2009). "Scientology: The Truth Rundown". Tampa Bay Times.
20. Tobin, Maurice; Childs, Joe; Rivenbark (January 13, 2013). "Suppressed: Mike Rinder - Why they stay". Tampa Bay Times. {{cite news}}: More than one of |first1= and |first= specified (help)
21. Pouw, Karin (June 24, 2012). "Church of Scientology responds to Times series about FBI investigation". Tampa Bay Times.
22. ^ Tobin, Thomas C; Childs, Joe (February 10, 2012). "Ex-Clearwater Scientology officer Debbie Cook testifies she was put in 'The Hole,' abused for weeks". Tampa Bay Times.
23. Ortega, Tony (January 4, 2012). "Scientology in Crisis: Debbie Cook's Transformation from Enforcer to Whistleblower". Village Voice.
24. ^ Tobin, Thomas C; Childs, Joe (February 10, 2012). "Leaving the Church of Scientology: a huge step". Tampa Bay Times.
25. Rathbun, Mark (July 2, 2012). "Former Church of Scientology inspector general Marty Rathbun explains how he escaped a destructive cult and what Katie Holmes is up against". New York Daily News.
26. Wright, Lawrence (February 11, 2011). "The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology". The New Yorker.

Bibliography

• Atack, Jon (1990). A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed. Carol Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8184-0499-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bromley, David G. (2009). "Making Sense of Scientology: Prophetic, Contractual Religion". In Lewis, James R (ed.). Scientology. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195331493. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kent, Stephen A (2001). From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815629481. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Melton, J. Gordon (2011). Religious Celebrations: An Encyclopedia of Holidays, Festivals, Solemn Observances, and Spiritual Commemorations. ABC-CLIO.
• Reitman, Janet (2011). Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 9780618883028. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Scientology properties
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