Danny Masterson's Scientology Success
Danny Masterson's Scientology Success
I have been writing about Scientology since leaving Scientology in 2014 after being in the cult since 1989.
I have to admit that I used to dislike the celebrity stories regarding Scientology and saw them as mostly salacious and inaccurate gossip, especially if the majority of media companies did the stories. There are a number of people who as journalists and authors have done superb work on the topic but for the twenty or so people who have done a great job we unfortunately have the rest of the media that mostly did an uneven job at best and a terrible job at worst.
I know these stories get the most attention from the media and general public but I was opposed to them in general for a variety of reasons and found them exasperating and saw them as mostly harmful. I found them harmful because in my opinion they don't represent the majority of experiences in Scientology and the majority of effects created by Scientology.
You can't inform the public if you tell them inaccurate things and things that you don't find the context for. Scientology has beautiful buildings in Clearwater, Florida and Los Angeles, California and thousands of people in both areas.
But the details of the lives of these people involve coercive control and covert mind control efforts so insidious they are intended to traumatize, confuse, and mentally enslave people without their knowledge or consent. That's relevant.
The people in Scientology are pressured to get heavy indoctrination in Scientology doctrine. They are also heavily pressured to follow the doctrine in a very rigid and fundamentalist manner. You have to get with the program in Scientology regarding your behavior or you will be be encouraged more and more harshly until you are excommunicated and have to disconnect from everyone you know in Scientology.
If you don't want this outcome you have to disconnect from everyone you know who is not in good standing in Scientology. At first this may seem ambiguous but in practice it's not. In practice thousands and thousands of people are encouraged to disconnect from everyone who doesn't join Scientology and remain in good standing. If like myself you have a wife and two children who are introduced to Scientology and decide they don't want to be Scientologists it is routine to be pressured over and over again to leave your family. Yep.
Scientology which promotes itself as building strong families in reality has torn apart many, many thousands, probably tens of thousands, of families over seventy plus years.
I met several hundred people in Scientology in my twenty five years. I was involved mostly in the Buffalo New York organization and briefly was at the organizations in New York City and Los Angeles, at The Excalibur Building in New York and as part of the KTL/LOC evolution in LA respectively. I spent a couple of months at each of those places.
I have interacted with far more ex Scientologists after leaving than I did while in the organization and I have read numerous biographies and accounts by ex members since leaving Scientology.
Scientology probably had a peak membership of around a hundred thousand active members perhaps in the eighties or nineties and has been dwindling in the following years and today is likely at twenty thousand or so members max. Perhaps it's even significantly smaller.
For many years after leaving Scientology I spent hundreds of hours examining literature and videos on cults and Scientology and its true history to understand what actually happened to me and what I was a part of.
I saw that the media on rare occasions does good or great work regarding Scientology but it is generally not as good as I wish regarding accuracy and depth.
I have seen more and more higher profile stories of Scientology emerge in the last few years and I have seen the rise of people who describe Scientology and cults in the areas of the internet and YouTube. The fact is that now a number of people have reached a larger and larger portion of the population. The fact is that these media are different from television shows and magazine and newspaper articles.
You can write extensive and detailed information in a blog. You can dig deep into the language and doctrine of Scientology in numerous YouTube videos and you can be simply self taught or an ex cult member and not a journalist.
The fact is that you can go into far more detail in these areas.
The rise of the popularity of the subject and the publication of more and more books on Scientology and cults combined with the more in depth and in many cases more accurate media available have created an environment more conducive to education regarding cults.
Plainly if the public is "cult curious" or "Scientology watching" they have a great chance to get good and accurate information where this was a less likely outcome just a few years ago.
They can read any number of books now or start reading The Underground Bunker blog by Tony Ortega or watch the YouTube videos of Scientology experts such as Jon Atack or Chris Shelton and get a really good understanding of Scientology.
Recently the ex Scientologists making YouTube channels and videos of their own has exploded and as of this writing is north of thirty. And I am just including the ones I know of that regularly create content.
And there are even more people who in my opinion are creating good content regarding cults and Scientology who were never in the cult such as Steve Hassan, Janja Lalich, Daniel Shaw, Rachel Bernstein, and several others.
So, this has created the pleasant surprise of an environment where people in the media are better informed about Scientology and cults quite often than they would have been before and they in turn are doing a far better job of informing and educating the public. And because of the more interactive experience you have with social media and YouTubers this creates a sort of a feedback loop in which the public corrects and informs the media.
Thirty years ago an inaccurate story didn't get a bunch of immediate responses by people who have a list of quotes and court rulings and citations to back up their claims, now it often does.
If you have a YouTube channel or blog or you post on Twitter if you are completely off base you are almost guaranteed to get information to enlighten you. You have to either adapt or get burned.
The fact is now in my opinion thanks to the hard work of Jon Atack, Tony Ortega, Mike Rinder, Leah Remini, Chris Shelton and a lot of other people the truth is both more accessible and more accessed regarding Scientology than ever before by a tremendous degree.
The public certainly deserves credit for listening and reading and opening their minds to the information but they have a far greater opportunity. Someone once said you can't know what you can't learn and you can't learn information if you don't have it available for your examination.
In the past you had to make a huge investment in time and effort to even discover who to ask for accurate information and you had to personally look up records and study psychology and hypnosis and the occult and on and on to investigate Scientology. And you had to be able to somehow even know the subjects that Scientology is related to or derived from to start on your way.
But the situation is increasingly improving and likely to only get better as the thirty plus Scientology YouTubers create content.
The current environment is one in which numerous other people are doing stories on Scientology and they are all kinds of people who have all kinds of channels. I see people who cover a variety of topics and people who cover law and ex cons and people who review books and other content creators who have been making videos on Scientology.
Of course the documentaries and high profile books by people like Mike Rinder and Leah Remini and their award winning series Scientology and The Aftermath have helped tremendously.
Now both YouTubers and traditional media outlets are not approaching things as they used to. Now they are coming to the story better informed. They are beginning to say, "In Scientology there is the practice of disconnection and thousands and thousands of families are broken up, I read your book and I saw the families telling their stories in interviews!" And they are beginning to say, "I read the Scientology policies that forbid reporting Scientologists to the police and understand this is a high crime in Scientology, which results in a suppressive person declare and excommunication from Scientology which includes disconnection from your family."
People are telling these crucial truths so much that they are being accepted as established facts, which is good because they happen to be the truth.
So, the stories that used to be celebrity gossip and often inaccurate now have the truth bleeding into them. It's not true every time anyone does a story, but it's increasingly the case that the truth about disconnection and the truth about hiding crimes and the truth about other things is more and more becoming a necessary component to do a Scientology story.
If you don't have these facts, the public rips into you. So, you feel compelled to say them unequivocally, whereas before they were either not mentioned or were stated as unproven or with ambiguous language. That's no longer the case more often than not.
So, now the story of Danny Masterson has put the practice of hiding crimes in Scientology by prominent people (especially wealthy celebrities) front and center and done the same thing regarding the practices of disconnection and fair game.
You can't accurately tell the story of the case and the history of the events and charges without explaining that the women were told they were forbidden from reporting their rapes to the police. You can't tell the story of the case and the many years after the rapes before the trial without explaining how Scientology reframed the rapes by Danny Masterson as the fault of the victims and gaslighted them for daring to acknowledge being raped by a rich and famous Scientologist. You can't tell the story of the case without telling how David Miscavige directed the fair game practices to utterly ruin anyone who could harm the reputation of Scientology and this includes women who are raped by Danny Masterson, so David Miscavige directed the fair game campaigns against these women and their families. (David Miscavige Scientology leader pictured below)
So, as a result of the combination of his fame, wealth, a far better environment for telling accurate and complex stories about Scientology and people doing a much better job in both providing and consuming content regarding Scientology an almost miraculous transformation has occurred.
Now, the story of Danny Masterson is in my opinion being presented in a far better way than past stories of this kind would have been and is being understood by the public far better, in my opinion they are understanding the details about Scientology practices and doctrine far, far better than they would have before and this includes the reprehensible conduct by David Miscavige and people following his orders and the explicit policy of Scientology and the actions of all the people involved from Danny Masterson himself to his victims to the Scientology staff and Sea Org members and the people in their lives who discouraged the victims from seeking justice, often including their own families.
This simply wouldn't have happened a few years ago.
The better informed media are doing a better job and the new media are doing a more in depth and comprehensive job, making this possible.
I think Danny Masterson said he wished people knew what Scientology was really like years ago.
I am optimistic in my surprise that I think to a far greater degree a far greater portion of the public is getting the truth about Scientology now and understanding it far better.
Danny Masterson has a great "success" for Scientology. He has shown millions that Scientology will protect a serial rapist in himself if it will protect the public relations image of Scientology. He has shown Scientology will humiliate and blame victims and destroy their families and threaten them with fair game campaigns and then carry them out if they speak the truth. He has shown clearly that David Miscavige is directing these efforts. He has shown clearly that David Miscavige is willing to lie, lie, and lie about the practices and doctrine of Scientology over and over. You don't have to spend twenty five years in Scientology and the better part of a decade studying the true history of the group like I have to see it. The abundant evidence is on blogs and in the court record.
Danny Masterson has shown who he is, who David Miscavige is and what the Scientology organization is and does.
He has succeeded in what he wished for - we now have millions of people who have the truth about Scientology and his actions were a catalyst for that happening.
Ultimately I am not ecstatic about this, even though I believe it is cathartic for many people who were in Scientology or other cults or abusive relationships and feel vindicated or finally heard or understood because of this.
I know at least five women testified bravely about the terrible crimes Danny Masterson committed against them and there are many more accusations that have not resulted in charges whether it is because of the statute of limitations or the place the rapes occurred or other reasons. By no means do I believe Danny Masterson only committed two or three or even five rapes. I am not saying that at all.
If I had the option to either have the status quo remain or to magically make the rapes disappear and never have happened, I would change the past and take away his terrible crimes.
Maybe Danny Masterson magically gets a conscience that he lacks in the past or just knows he would get caught if he rapes someone and restrains himself out of self interest (retroactively) and we never get the story and trials.
I hope I would have the past changed because those women matter, their lives matter, their happiness and peace of mind matter. And I am not so callous as to want them to suffer to gain the benefits of the media attention that came as a result of their suffering. It's too high a cost, by orders of magnitude.
But in reality I know that I have no way to make that bargain for the survivors, though I wish somehow I could, because they matter far more than the story.
But I have to deal with reality, not my preference. The survivors certainly have to deal with reality.
I don't expect the verdict or sentence to take away their pain or remove the trauma inflicted on them. I hope the verdict, the sentence, the fact that they stood up and persisted and the fact that they are being seen and in my opinion believed in a way they would not have been in the past gives them some degree of peace and even hopefully a chance to move forward.
I have had more than a little experience with trauma and think we often don't leave it behind or completely heal from trauma quite often, especially severe trauma, but we can hopefully move forward sometimes and carry it with us.
My deepest wish is for the survivors to get the greatest relief possible and to have the fullest recovery possible and I think that should temper any joy we have regarding the truth increasingly coming out more fully and accurately to more and more people. For the truth about Scientology and the horrific crimes tied to Scientology to come out, tragically the crimes had to exist.
I have over six hundred posts on Scientology at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology. Most of them are listed with descriptions of categories at my blog archive by category.
Danny Masterson's Scientology Success
