In this episode, Ron sits down with author Ron Miscavige to talk about his new book, "Ruthless: Scientology, My Son, David, and Me." Ron also talks about his escape from The Church of Scientology and how he escaped from the organization. He talks about the events that led him to leave the organization and why he decided to write a book about it. He also discusses his experience with the Dallas Police Department and how they handled his case. And he talks about how he got out of the church. This episode is sponsored by Tony Ortega's underground bunker, The Underground Bunker. To learn more about the bunker, go to the website TonyOrtega.co/undergroundbunker and use the promo code "UNDERSTANDING" at checkout to get 10% off your first month with discount code POWER10 at checkout. You can also get 20% off the purchase of a copy of the book, Ruthless: My Son David and Me. at Amazon Prime and Vimeo. If you don't have a Kindle device, you can get a free eReader edition of the Kindle Fire, also available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, or Audible, and Audible. Itunes, and Paperback. Kindle $99, and iBookstore $99.99, or an Audible $49.99. All Audible is selling for $19.99 starting on January 1st, 2019. We'll be giving you a free copy of Ruthless, my son's new book. Thanks for listening to this episode! I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you so much for listening and reviewing it! You'll get a chance to know more about my book, I'm looking forward to hearing from me! I'm working on a new book coming out soon! -- Thank you for supporting me in the next episode of Behind the Scenes. -- I'll be posting it on my next episode, and I'll send you a review of the podcast on my social media platform, too! and you'll get the chance to review the book on my insta story on my website, I'll get an ad on the podcast next week! Tweet me on my Insta: if you have a review and review it on Insta story about the book I'm listening to it on your feed? & much more!
00:00:18.000Sometimes, like, some of the best stuff gets said off mic, so we figured now how to do it where people get in, and pretty much as soon as we sit down, we start talking.
00:00:50.000Now, let me just say this before we get started, because Scientology, this is the first time I've ever been contacted...
00:00:57.000They sent an email to my publicist and they have a rebuttal to what you wrote and their rebuttal is at a website ronmiscavagebook.com and they want people to know about their website which is Scientology.org and they have a statement.
00:01:24.000Ron Miscavige is seeking to make money on the name of his famous son David Miscavige.
00:01:31.000Oh, David Miscavige has taken care of his father throughout his life, both financially and by helping him in even the most dire circumstances.
00:01:39.000Ron Miscavige was nowhere around when David Miscavige ascended to the leadership of the Church of Scientology, mentioned by and working directly with the religion's founder L. Ron Hubbard and entrusted by him with the future of the Church.
00:02:32.000And, look, I feel like, I don't know the story, but any time a father is so disconnected from his son, they have to write a book about him.
00:03:34.000About a year and a half later, there was a private investigator caught by the name of Dwayne Powell who was around the corner from my house looking at a house to buy so he could spy on me from that house.
00:05:08.000If I follow Jamie, you know what I'm going to get?
00:05:12.000I'm going to get Jamie looking at the internet, Jamie watching basketball, maybe Jamie goes to the gym, maybe Jamie goes for a run, maybe Jamie goes on Tinder and does a little swipe and write.
00:06:29.000The guy, Greg, said, listen, let me call you back.
00:06:32.000A couple minutes later, a guy come on the phone, identified himself as David Miscavige, and he said to them, listen, if it's his time to die, let him die.
00:07:17.000But as he grew older, as he got into Scientology, which I got him in, by the way, and I can get into that, how I got him in, he then started acquiring power.
00:07:26.000And I think he went from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.
00:07:30.000As an example, when I worked on staff, he never referred to me as Dad.
00:07:37.000The base that I lived on in Hammett It got to the point where if you wanted to send a letter to somebody, you had to write the letter, put it in an unsealed envelope, the security guards would read it, see if there was anything bad in there that I shouldn't be saying, send it back, and I would correct it.
00:07:53.000When it was okay, then they'd seal the envelope and send it out.
00:07:56.000If I wanted to call somebody on the telephone, I had to have somebody listening on the other extension.
00:09:08.000And I'm telling you, at what they call the bottom of the bridge, because the entire Scientology experience would be A bridge to total freedom.
00:09:17.000You enter in at a certain point, you're given basic things, basic courses, basic communication skills that you're taught.
00:09:24.000And I'm telling you, you go out on the street after you do this stuff, and you're more effective in handling life.
00:09:28.000So the early stages of it you feel are very effective.
00:10:45.000That's the first step on taking you on this entire journey.
00:10:49.000And then maybe you'll learn how you could divide your business into seven parts so that you could monitor various parts of it, or your life into seven parts so you could manage how you're doing income-wise, how education is your public relations.
00:11:03.000These are all things you can easily agree to.
00:11:06.000So now, a little later on, there's a datum or a fact introduced that doesn't quite make sense to you.
00:11:13.000You think, you know what, everything they told me was good so far, I'm just going to accept this.
00:12:38.000Why doesn't somebody just take that part and just, like, get rid of the rest?
00:12:43.000Listen, I tell in my book what we're looking at right here.
00:12:47.000You know, ruthless, Scientology, my son David Miscavige and me.
00:12:51.000I say at the very end, if they were just to stick to the beginning things, number one, and number two, have a general amnesty where they forgive everybody who they think has tried to dunderman.
00:13:03.000The shit's gonna hit the fan, but maybe at the end of it, you'd get some people back and knock off the disconnection policy.
00:13:10.000I think if they did that, it could be one of the best self-help groups ever.
00:13:14.000But once you get up into those upper levels where they tell you you're going to become a superhuman, as an example, you'll be able to, as a spiritual being, leave your body and go some other place, as an example, and read a newspaper in Germany.
00:14:15.000Like, how are they supposed to go to Germany and read a newspaper?
00:14:19.000Well, there's drills that they have you do, like in the earlier, what they call OT levels, operating thetan.
00:14:29.000Thetan is a word they use for spiritual being.
00:14:33.000And one of the drills that you would do would be spot three objects outside of your body, spot three objects inside your body, spot three objects outside your body, spot three objects inside your body on a repetitive basis.
00:14:47.000And that's supposed to Let you out, as an example.
00:16:41.000Yeah, I played professionally my whole life.
00:16:45.000Nelson Sandy, and I've also been in the sales business because I had four kids, and you know, you've got to pay the bills no matter what you do.
00:16:51.000So Nelson was a friend of mine in sales, and one day he said to me, Ron, how would you like to make an extra $100,000 a year?
00:17:31.000I pinned him down for about a half an hour, and for whatever reason, the name rang a bell.
00:17:37.000So, he told me that I could go visit somebody who was a Scientologist, and they discuss it one day a week, a guy by the name of Frank Ogle in Woodbury, New Jersey.
00:17:47.000By the way, you're from North Jersey, aren't you?
00:19:55.000With communication you can stop asthma?
00:19:58.000You come to the point where you have a realization maybe where it started or how you could be contributing to it or maybe where it starts kicking in you.
00:20:06.000How old was he when you brought him in there?
00:20:07.000I guess this was, he was about nine years old.
00:20:26.000He used what's called creative processing, which is something that they used to use.
00:20:31.000And what it is, is you figure out how you could be contributing to that, and then you do a mental image picture of something that you think you're doing to contribute to that.
00:22:05.000I decided to take my whole family to England and in 1972 I moved there for a year and three months and had the whole family study Scientology.
00:22:16.000Yeah, and then came back for a little while and went over again in 1974, studied more Scientology.
00:22:23.000When I was there at that time, I got a recording deal with the Polydor Company, solo album, and I got a writer's contract with Chappell's Publishing, and I got asked to play on VBC. All of this is in the book, by the way.
00:23:59.000Like, do you owe them anything for billion years?
00:24:01.000Listen, you're getting the skinny, and as hard as this is to believe, once you're in it for a while, and you see that this is helping you and maybe your family, The point of is that they want to get this disseminated to every man, woman,
00:24:17.000and child on the planet and improve life for everybody.
00:24:20.000So it's like you're on this crusade to get it disseminated.
00:24:24.000So they believe they're doing this to help people.
00:24:39.000They get people to donate money to what's called the International Association of Scientologists, or donate money to build a new church someplace, and they give you a piece of paper and commend you, you know?
00:24:52.000It's a nice business, low overhead, you know?
00:24:54.000So, you give them money, they give you paper?
00:24:57.000They give you a commendation, or saying you're this or that.
00:25:00.000Some level, right, you've achieved some success.
00:25:03.000And the thing is, look, they've opened a lot of new buildings.
00:25:17.000Well, if you go on the internet, you can find out all the abuses they've done.
00:25:20.000Like people going bankrupt because they had to contribute so much money they get a second and third mortgage on their house, give it to the church.
00:27:01.000I kind of looked at that and I thought, well, I was 17. Maybe it looked like I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I came out a winner.
00:27:09.000And if David wants to do this, and what is he going to get out of going to school?
00:27:14.000And he has no desire to do anything else.
00:27:35.000The Sea Organization is a term used because...
00:27:40.000In 1967, Ron started what he called the Sea Project, where he bought this ship and invited people to come with him to contribute to this project.
00:27:54.000Saying that his research could be done better away from land masses.
00:27:59.000I mean, in fact, the law was after him.
00:28:39.000Well, the Sea Org was on this ship, and they'd have people come there for advanced-level services, get that, and they would send missions out to various organizations to correct any outnesses in the way maybe they were delivering the technology or fix something that was going wrong.
00:28:57.000It was run like a little military organization.
00:29:01.000And then the Sea Org went ashore and they established the flag land base in Clearwater, Florida.
00:29:54.000He lived from 1834 to the early 1900s.
00:29:57.000He's the one that made the observation, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:30:06.000And I think this is what happened to David.
00:30:09.000That when L. Ron Hubbard died, he saw a chance to move up And he got people out of the way who didn't want to cooperate with him, put people on various posts that would cooperate with him, and he took over the ownership and the leadership of Scientology.
00:30:26.000And what contributed to that was an incident where he had a severe asthmatic attack and they had to take him to the emergency room of a hospital.
00:30:35.000Paul Grady is the guy that took him there.
00:30:38.000And when Paul picked him up after they did the stuff, they handled him, he was okay.
00:30:44.000David said to Paul, listen, I had a great realization when I was there, and it's this.
00:35:40.000What do you guys do for L. Ron's birthday?
00:35:42.000Well there would be an event where you would Show him in various aspects of life Improving life in some aspect and we have a video on that and we would have to write music for that Sydney would have to shoot the pictures or take old pictures and Produce these edit them we do music for it and we'd have a product or an event when David's doing the event they could present this for when the The anniversary of Dianetics,
00:36:10.000Modern Science and Mental Health, that was another event.
00:38:37.000The guy wrote more fake shit than any person that's ever walked the face of the earth, but he also had the time to talk to the aliens to get all this data to write this real stuff.
00:38:53.000That's a suspension of disbelief that defies logic.
00:39:27.000He fit that bill that I was talking about earlier, where he's a guy that's always improving himself, he's healthy, exercised, he's well-kept, he was a nice neighbor.
00:42:05.000That goes this way, this way, up, down, and in.
00:42:12.000So if you got a word that you'd like to look up and get the meaning of, you'd go to the library, not the library, the dictionary, and you'd select the word and press it to the right and it would say search store.
00:42:26.000I accidentally held it a little bit too long and it went right past search store and To Google.
00:43:44.000And there was a girl named Annie Tidman...
00:43:47.000Who was with L. Ron Hubbard when he died.
00:43:50.000Annie Tidman was a messenger with L. Ron Hubbard since she was a little girl and she was with him when he actually died.
00:44:01.000So Annie was a long-term loyal Scientologist.
00:44:05.000She's at the base where I lived in Hammett and she got lung cancer.
00:44:11.000So they sent her to Los Angeles to get care and they sent a girl down To be like a personal servant to take care of her needs so she'd be okay.
00:44:20.000So occasionally I would say to Martine, who's the medical liaison officer, in other words, she took care of our health and she'd have us go to the doctors and stuff.
00:45:05.000They either know and they're keeping up the ruse or they don't know and they're being used as shills to make sure people think she's still alive.
00:45:52.000So now Dougie's up there, and then he starts saying, you know, he says, I'll tell you, my kid was picked up by the cops the other day, but he's not really a bad kid, you know?
00:46:00.000He's hanging out with the wrong guys, and blah, blah, blah.
00:46:03.000And he's all saying this shit that you don't say to this exclusive audience.
00:46:20.000What I should have done was kicked in the band, because I was directing the band, kicked in the band to start playing the music and drowned them out.
00:46:29.000You go in the builds, the temperature down there is between 125 and 130 degrees.
00:48:47.000No, it was the treatment, the way people were being treated, and some of the shit that went down, like...
00:48:52.000So would you have been okay if they treated you well, and you still found out that that woman had been dead for six months, that L. Ron Hubbard wasn't really a war hero?
00:50:50.000I think anybody who gets to, I mean, it's really unfortunate, but anybody who gets to any, even a position of being like a drug kingpin, like Pablo Escobar, I'm sure he could have been successful at other things had he decided to focus his mind in that direction.
00:51:07.000You're exactly right, and that's how I feel.
00:51:09.000So you feel like your son just fucked up in getting on a path that is, in your eyes, illegitimate versus, you know, him being CEO of IBM or something like that?
00:52:14.000Do people really believe that, or do they just kind of go along with it because everybody else is going along with it?
00:52:21.000Is there ever a time where you're alone with somebody else in the Sea Org, maybe you're setting up some video or something like that, and someone goes, hey man, is this shit on the up and up?
00:52:55.000And if it's found out later that he said this to you and you didn't write a knowledge report, you are as culpable as he is for saying that.
00:53:46.000Why don't we just take the beginning parts of this and just get rid of all this stupid shit about, you know, separating from your children and make this thing better?
00:53:56.000Well, first of all, you wouldn't dare do that if you were at a place like I was, at the international base, okay, which is Golden Air Productions in Hammett, California.
00:57:27.000I didn't want to have the post anymore.
00:57:28.000I was getting old and got this young guy and I would write melodies All day, all week, months, every melody I ever wrote was rejected by him.
00:57:41.000In other words, everything I was doing was a piece of shit, but I couldn't quit.
00:57:47.000So this new guy was not fun to work with?
00:58:00.000I didn't have a rich daddy or something.
00:58:02.000A contract with Chappell's Publishing for my writing and asked to play on the BBC. Nobody had achieved that in that department.
00:58:10.000Now, maybe my skills weren't up to how they write modern music, and I used to beg him, I said, listen, what do you want as an acceptable particle?
00:58:45.000I said, I don't care if you get me a job waxing cars in motor pool, but I want to do something so at the end of the day, you can say, here's what he did.
01:00:02.000By the way, my wife's younger than me.
01:00:03.000My first wife, I divorced her and married a much younger woman.
01:00:07.000So her mother is going to have her 70th birthday.
01:00:11.000So we decide to send her mother 70 gifts.
01:00:15.000Now, in order to do this, it has to go through the security guards.
01:00:19.000So we would send her like a detailing kit for a car.
01:00:23.000I mean, her chances of detailing a car as a gift We're nil to none, but they saw that, okay, we're sending her 70 gifts, so it got through them.
01:00:33.000We sent her our L. Ron Hubbard library, books that we had, some other things, and we got a lot of stuff out of there that I couldn't fit in the car when we were going.
01:01:15.000And I used to keep, like, Italian salami, maybe supersat, some Parmesan cheese, Romano cheese.
01:01:22.000So early Sunday morning at 9 o'clock, And I planned this out because there's two gates.
01:01:27.000There's one main gate where there's a security guard sitting in a booth and then down the road about 200 yards there's another gate where there's a little camera and they see you coming.
01:01:38.000And they got used to me going across to the north side to go to the studio and I'd come back through the main gate and bring the security guards a piece of cheese or salami.
01:01:49.000So they thought, hey, Sunday morning he's going to get his goodies.
01:01:53.000In other words, I'm feeding the watchdogs.
01:01:57.000So comes the day we're going to leave.
01:01:58.000March 25th, 2012. We got up real early and I had a little notebook.
01:02:04.000I must have checked it 20 times what I wanted to take, what I wanted to leave behind.
01:02:08.000Like the night before, and by the way, my biggest cover on being able to get out of there was the fact that I was 76 years old and I was the father of the chairman of the board.
01:02:19.000Nobody would suspect that I was going to leave unauthorizedly.
01:02:25.000So I'm out with a mesh bag full of shoes, putting it in the car, and one of the security guards come by on his bicycle, an Italian guy, Sal.
01:09:08.000As a father, because I'm a father and you're a father...
01:09:12.000The idea of being estranged from your kids in that way, where your kid hates you and your kid doesn't want anybody to save you if you die, do you feel any remorse?
01:09:24.000Do you feel like in any way you fucked up?
01:09:26.000Do you ever look at your life and go, how did I lose my connection with my son?
01:10:03.000He's the one who got the power to do all these things.
01:10:05.000I understand, but you raised him, right?
01:10:07.000I mean, whatever connection and bond that you developed with him.
01:10:10.000Yeah, and we had a great life together when he was growing up, too.
01:10:12.000That didn't carry forth in some way, you know what I'm saying?
01:10:15.000I mean, obviously I'm not in Scientology, and obviously I was not in your situation, but I can't imagine that you must have gone over it And looked at your communications with him and wondered if maybe if you extended yourself more,
01:10:31.000if you talked more, is there something you could have done that would have prevented any of this?
01:11:10.000If somebody goes against the church or talks out against the church and they're declared a suppressive person, he can be lied to, tricked to, and destroyed with no punishment on the person who did it.
01:11:24.000What I mean is the really crazy stuff.
01:11:27.000Like the stuff that sounds like science fiction, about like the thetans and dropping them in a volcano and the hydrogen bomb and all that stuff.
01:12:02.000If a person does this, Find or manufacture data about the person.
01:12:08.000Okay, so once you've become their enemy, you left them, you're the dad of the chairman of the board, you're a sensitive particle, you've got a real problem.
01:12:22.000So you said they took out a bunch of different website addresses?
01:12:25.000Not a bunch, 500. In other words, they got 500 iterations of my name, variations.
01:12:31.000So no matter what you put in, and by the way, I have a website, which I did just then, and it's called therealronmiscavage.com.
01:12:39.000And you can see my website, but if you put any other thing in there, you're going to get a hate site that tells you things about me that You'd think I was the worst person who ever lived.
01:14:19.000I'm gonna do a book and I'm gonna expose what you do to people.
01:14:23.000Because if I did a blog, who am I? I'm gonna get maybe a couple thousand people to look at this blog, but a book I knew that I could get, and I was on 2020, I was on a Megyn Kelly show, I was on Late Night with Seth Meyers, so we got a lot of exposure,
01:14:39.000a lot of books, a lot of people are seeing what they did And I'm just hoping enough people do this so they're going to drop that disconnection policy.
01:14:51.000So do you think if they drop the disconnection policy, maybe a lot of the other policies would be more tolerable?
01:14:57.000I think if they dropped the disconnection policy and allowed you to talk to your family, listen, if they wanted to do Scientology and I could still talk to them, I wouldn't give a shit.
01:15:08.000I'd say, fine, do what you want to do.
01:15:10.000But wouldn't it bother you that they can't leave?
01:16:38.000Just imagine, she had to ask him if it's okay to come and see me.
01:16:43.000And they came to Celebrity Center and we spent about four days together and just having a good time, me cooking, just enjoying their company.
01:16:52.000It just, the whole scene is really bad.
01:17:43.000I can't imagine there's very many new people joining right now.
01:17:46.000You know, unless they're a shepherd or somebody like that or somebody who's never looked at the internet, you can't possibly, and this is what people do, To check something out, they'll Google it.
01:18:13.000And there's many, many, many datums about life that if you were a Scientologist and you see these, you say, wait a minute, L. Ron Hubbard used to say this, all right?
01:19:00.000And, of course, you wouldn't know, if you weren't a Scientologist, you wouldn't know which parts that he took out of that.
01:19:06.000But I've run across many, many things in the books that he just lifted, almost copied and pasted it and put it into what he called Scientology.
01:26:29.000Look, I don't know too much about it, but I know that there are some people who've done it who felt they had a lot of good wins out of it, okay?
01:29:20.000So there's something those guys are getting out of it.
01:29:23.000Yeah, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley and people like that, they get auditing and they get pampered and they don't have to follow money rules.
01:29:29.000So for them, it's almost like they're a part of a gang or something.
01:32:29.000You know, I'm an eternal optimist, and I would hope that one day you'd be able to speak to your kids, and one day you'd be able to speak to your son, and everybody could work this out.
01:32:38.000I would hope for the same thing, and I guess...
01:32:42.000I'm starting to lose hope on that matter because the years are going by now.
01:32:48.000I've been out for like five years and I don't know what's going to change it other than maybe enough people speaking out and them dropping that disconnection policy.