Rick Ross

And so you are asked questions about your life and what's going on in your life by the auditor. Tom Cruise has gone through this, John Travolta, Leah Remini at one point. And they take copious notes and they look at the e-meter to see when the needle moves. And when it moves, they know you're nervous about what they're asking you. And then they can drill down into that.

And people sign forms releasing their files to Scientology. So Scientology has... the goods on you. They know all about your life. They do this in what they call a process to deal with the negative reactive mind. That is to help you. It's all done under the idea that this is to help you become a better person, to realize your full potential. Tom Cruise has many times praised Scientology.

He says that it cured him of dyslexia. Other Scientologists will make similar claims. And Scientology considers itself the ultimate science of the mind. which is why they are very antagonistic to mental health professionals, who they see as, if you will, a competing source of help, an alternative to what they regard as the way to deal with your mind and your problems.

So Scientologists pay a lot of money for auditing. They pay a lot of money for these courses, and on and on it goes. And it can be quite expensive, moving up the OT levels, doing Scientology.

Well, on occasion, Scientologists will have problems that are not apparently effectively dealt with by Scientology. They may have a psychotic break. They may have... problems because they're schizophrenic or they're deeply depressed.

And Scientology says that they can cure these problems, but they apparently can't because there are families that say a suicide occurred because their family member did not get the help they needed or that they were in lockdown in Scientology because that was what Scientology felt they needed, though they did not. What is a lockdown? What is that?

Well, they will isolate a person and monitor them during a period of time which they believe will resolve their problem. And, you know, this... This happens with certain situations with Scientology, and people may not get the help that they need.

Well, there are people that have been locked in what's called the rehabilitation project force, you know, within Scientology. This is a program that Scientology runs where if you are deemed to be a problem, you can be isolated in a rehabilitation project for months, years. So it's a re-education program.

It supposedly is going to help this person to be a better, more productive member of society, of Scientology. But in reality, people that have been a part of this program, which they become isolated in this facility in Hemet, California, they feel it's like a prison. And there have been people held there for long periods of time.

And there have been people that claim they escaped from that program. So I would say that Scientology is a very, can be a very harsh, very controlling organization for people. And this can cause a lot of problems. And I've had complaints about Scientology going back decades.

If someone is put in that camp, it is with their consent, but I would argue, how did that consent, how was that consent obtained? What was the process? Because there have been allegations that it can be quite coercive, quite manipulative to get that person to go to that rehabilitation program. And it's a very, very harsh environment, according to people who have left.

So I would say that they are acting against their own best interests by being there. And in my opinion, that would be a sign of undue influence, that people are acting against their own best interests, but conforming to what the leadership wants them to do, which is in the leadership's best interest. So in my opinion, Scientology exercises very extreme undue influence over its members.

In my book, I wrote about a Scientologist that I was asked to intervene to get him out of Scientology. He had joined when he was 22. He had been in Scientology for 27 years. He was almost 50. when I met him. And his whole life had been Scientology from the time he was 22. And his wife was not a full-blown Scientologist. His two children had not become Scientologists, but they had not objected.

They had done courses. They had kind of placated him in Scientology, though they had concerns. They didn't really want to be all in. And so what happened was, at one point, Scientology wanted him to become a Sea Org member. They wanted him to go to a Scientology facility, live there, become full-time, and leave his family and divorce his wife.

And he told his wife this, and then his family decided to do an intervention. And boy, that was a tough one. But eventually, he decided to leave Scientology. And I think the point that he kind of had an epiphany that opened his mind to the possibility that Scientology wasn't quite what he thought was when we talked about what's called the purification rundown.

And this is a drug treatment, kind of all drugs, toxins out of your body treatment that Scientology does, which is a process of saunas, ingesting vegetable oil, large doses of niacin, and supposedly they can leach the toxins out of your body. And this is premised on the belief that was posited by L. Ron Hubbard,

the creator of Scientology, that if you use drugs, if, for example, you once used LSD or you once used some type of prescribed drug that was not good, such as Scientology would say that any psychiatric prescribed drug is a negative thing. So Scientology believes that that drug is in the fatty tissues of your body indefinitely, and that only through the purification rundown can it be extracted.

And that if it isn't extracted, you're at risk, because at any time, that might be released into your blood and then you would hallucinate, you would have a problem functioning. And so Scientology charges money to do the purification rundown and people go through this.

And when I was working with this man who had been in Scientology for 27 years, I said to him, you know that medical science has proven that Drugs do not reside in your fatty tissue indefinitely. And a drug test will show the presence of drugs for only a certain period of time that they flow out of the body, you know, and they're no longer there. And he found that very, very difficult to believe.

And so I showed him a great deal of documentation and evidence. And I said, look, when L. Ron Hubbard wrote this, That was back in the 50s. It was a long time ago, but science has moved forward, and the research shows that Hubbard was wrong. And so science isn't static. It evolves based on research and new information.