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John Sweeney looks back on his meeting with the late Shawn Lonsdale during the making of the famous BBC Panorama documentary “Scientology & Me”.

I was skimming through High Winds when I came across an article winningly headlined ‘Handling Suppression on the Fourth Dynamic’ (by then I had learnt that the ‘fourth dynamic’ meant the whole of mankind). In a tone of unforgiving militancy, it talked of ‘eradicating SPs’, and crowed about how they had ’shut down’ one particular defector who had criticised the movement. ‘Unemployed and abandoned by his family, this squirrel had schemed to make money by hawking his lies in a book. But the Office of Special Affairs had a court declare his book libellous. He has now been forced into bankruptcy…’

Dressed in black, sporting masks and handing out leaflets on a sunny Sunday morning, more than 30 people stand on an Edinburgh pavement protesting against the Church of Scientology in Scotland.
John is among them, a 29-year-old from Edinburgh who lifts up his grinning Guy Fawkes mask so he can explain why he’s standing with complete strangers on the city’s South Bridge with a flyer urging Scots not to “let a UFO cult take us back to the Middle Ages”.

The brilliantly slick My Name Is Earl carries the karmic principle through to its logical/absurd conclusion with reformed felon Earl Hickey making up for past wrongs by doing good deeds. It’s a feelgood kind of show. Yet there’s something rotten at the heart of Earl if you believe the whispers. Critics claim there’s an unholy influence by the Church of Scientology on the show with jobs for the boys and a crypto religious subtext just two of the allegations. I thought it was all about making a better world?

It included an allegation that the church at its UK headquarters in East Grinstead, Sussex, took in young English people with a history of mental illness.

The document said the young members paid fees of £450 and £500 before being classified as trouble-makers and put out on the street after suffering breakdowns.

It also said the church created family discord and broke up marriages, referring to a six-year-old who was declared a “suppressive” because she would not leave her mother.

The same people who had tried to obtain my exdirectory phone number, handed out pamphlets attacking me, and dispatched an American private detective - an ex-Los Angeles police officer - to Britain to frighten and smear the source who had helped me expose their activities.

Almost daily threatening letters arrived by fax and post at the newspaper where I used to work. Messages were left on the answer machine at the home of the managing director.

Strangers turned up in his village asking questions about him.

And the culprits behind this campaign of intimidation? Step forward the Church of Scientology.

However, to understand how I felt, you’ve got to spend six months investigating the Church of Scientology, then a whole week of continued contact with both its followers and its ex-followers, then spend 90 minutes inside an exhibition on mind control and then try to behave normally.

I felt as though I was losing my mind to them.

A BBC source said Mr Sweeney, who has apologised for his rant, had become distressed after following Scientologists for days and watching harrowing footage of people being tortured as part of an exhibition by the church attacking psychiatry.

The source added: “It was a very intense time. He was completely in the wrong and should never have lost his rag - but he’s only human.”

Mr Sweeney said: “I am hugely embarrassed. I let the side down and the BBC down and I am ashamed but I felt I was being brainwashed.

“If people see the full clip, I think they will have more sympathy with me.”