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After an embarrassing string of high-profile defection and leaked videos, Scientology is under attack from a faceless cabal of online activists. Has America’s most controversial religion finally met its match?
Clearwater is prepared for its enemies. It’s a warm, if overcast, Saturday in February, but all the storefronts lining the sidewalks of this sleepy town on […]

In the religion children are regularly hooked up to a LIE DETECTOR made from SOUP CANS and ELECTRODES to test their commitment to the church.

Headley, 34, quit the faith after becoming disillusioned with it’s bizarre practises. He says of the 45-year-old Top Gun star, now second-in-command of the church: “Tom is on a mission… to turn EVERYONE into a Scientologist.

The church has been accused of being directly responsible for the financial ruin of some of its most fervently faithful, but Danos said getting started in Scientology is “extremely inexpensive.”

“You can go in and do something for 30 bucks,” she said. “The first book is 10 bucks.”

Woodcraft, though, warns that things get exponentially pricier once you reach the religion’s highest echelons, or if you try to quit.

“If you leave,” she said, “they send a bill for everything you’ve done.”

Woodcraft’s, which she still has a copy of, was $89,000. Modest compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars she said some people end up dropping just to rise up the ranks.

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…’

Scientologists are at war with a member of their own family - the outspoken niece of the church’s powerful leader, David Miscavige.

Jenna Hill Miscavige, 24, the daughter of David’s older brother Ron, recently came out in support of Andrew Morton’s “Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography,” and slammed the star for “supporting a religion that tears apart families, both in the media and monetarily.” Since then, Jenna claims she’s been subjected to harassment.

They repeated the Scientologist dogma that mental ailments - conditions that doctors now know to have a biological basis as surely as cancer and influenza - are a sort of imaginary miasma summoned into existence by negative thoughts and the evil residue from your past lives - i.e., if you’re bipolar, it’s your fault. We were particularly scandalized that one of the emissaries was a professional educator in her day-to-day life, yet seemed entirely beholden to Scientological conspiracy theories about psychiatric medication. Amazingly, these folks seemed genuinely amazed that the media was more interested in Tom Cruise’s loony comments about Brooke Shields’ postpartum depression than the fact that the Church had recently dispatched aid workers to Indonesia.

The biographer of Princess Diana alleges Cruise is consulted by Scientology leader David Miscavige on “every aspect of planning and policy” and is tailoring his career to fit the aims of Scientology.

Miscavige is said in the book to have gone to extraordinary lengths to charm Cruise, even ordering his staff to plant a field full of wild flowers at a Scientology base in California after Cruise had told him of his fantasy to run through a wildflower meadow with his then newlywed wife Nicole Kidman.

The relationship between the two men is so close that, according to Morton’s book, Miscavige even joined him on honeymoon in the Maldives after his wedding to Katie Holmes in 2006.

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.

Scientology teaches its adherents to file reports on members who are acting against the church. Such people are deemed to have brought shame on their families and are sent to ‘ethics’ sessions, where they are questioned for hours about their thoughts and forced to make ‘amends,’ which can include manual labour.

Finally, Astra extricated herself from the movement in 1998, but not before she confessed to a list of petty crimes to avoid being declared a Suppressive Person.

Other Scientologists are ordered not to speak to such outcasts, who are declared enemies, and Astra didn’t want to lose contact with her family.