Rush & Molloy, when you deliver, you deliver. Naturally, Scientology spokescreature Tommy Davis and Cruise's lawyer Bert Fields have already disputed the claim, but parts of what Rathbun told the New York Daily News gossips are just too wildly outlandish and extreme to go so far as to believe they're completely without merit, and Rathbun's claims have been backed before in the St. Petersburg Times by several other defectors.

Basically, it boils down to this: whenever Tom Cruise was around, Scientology leader David Miscavige would have "the Tom Cruise arrival preparation drill" which consisted of orchestrating every single move they would make around Scientology's superstar. But that's not the catch. Here's where it gets interesting:

Miscavige had imprisoned Marc Yager, Guillaume Leserve and Ray Mithoff, three Scientology members who were being interrogated. Miscavige was berating Scientology managers for not being hard enough on the three in order to extract confessions from them. And by "hard enough," he means "you haven't sufficiently beat the shit out of them." This is insane:

"Miscavige berated [the managers] for being far too light in their demands for confessions" from the three, Rathbun alleges in his letter, "because they refused to beat [them] ... to pulps. Miscavige said that Tom … had vowed to come to the Hole and personally ‘beat the living [bleep]' out of Yager, Leserve and Mithoff if the managers failed to do so themselves. "In response, the mob rushed at the three targeted gentlemen," Rathbun claimed. "Fists flew and feet kicked into the three. They continued to pound until … each had two black eyes."

Right? This goes hand in hand (or rather: fist in hand) with what the St. Petersburg Times has been reporting, especially considering the multiple reports of Miscavige taking part in violence against other members himself that have surfaced. Spokesthing Tommy Davis' response:

Yager, Leserve and Mithoff have all provided sworn affidavits stating they were not assaulted, and that numerous witnesses have also testified that Miscavige never invoked Cruise's name.

Right, the out-and-out denials without any concessions. Naturally. Rathbun's already confessed to taking part in beatdowns like these when he was a member. Miscavige might not have invoked Cruise's name in this instance—we'll never know—but it's hard to imagine him not invoking His Holy Maverick as a threat against other members. But it feels like the Daily News really buried the lede, here: Cruise lawyer Burt Fields threatening to sue Marty Rathbun if he reveals what was in Tom Cruise's audit file.

Responds Fields: "I would be surprised if David Miscavige was beating people up." And while he says "Tom is not a very litigious person," he said he will sue Rathbun if he reveals what was discussed during "audit" sessions where the actor shared confidences with Rathbun. He may not need to worry about that. Rathbun tells us, "I would never reveal what Tom told me, not if a gun were put to my head. Unlike the church, which does, I actually hold those secrets sacrosanct."

That's certainly interesting, considering the Church already opened up their audit files to the St. Petersburg Times in order to publicly shame defecting members. Interesting how they have yet to open up recent defector Paul Haggis' audit file. Paul Haggis, when he recently defected from Scientology, cited the opening of the audit files as one of the main reasons why he had to leave the church. Also: Tom Cruise had audit sessions? And Marty Rathbun—who defected—was in them?

It's only a matter of time before this guy tells people what happened in Cruise's audit sessions. And Marty, if you're listening, I promise you: we have a very open ear (and wallet).

So, okay: Tommy Davis is having meltdowns on network television and then knocking on ABC's door to make them take the story down. Reports of defectors being stalked by Scientology's private investigators are surfacing. Reports of Miscavige freaking out and beating members came out earlier this year. Paul Haggis defected, John Travolta openly defied them, high level members are defecting, everyone's running their mouths. And now Tom Cruise's American bankability—and the power he once held in the entertainment industry—is dwindling by the day. Remember that time he jumped on Oprah's couch four years ago? Keep it in mind, because it's beginning to look the very first pin being pulled from Scientology's foundation now that all the other pieces are falling down around it.

Maybe Scientology has some good intentions for its members; many religions and spiritual orientations do, whether you call it a cult or otherwise. But one thing keeps getting clearer and clearer: the draconian culture of celebrity worship and the despotic bureaucracy and culture of fear keeps making Scientology look worse, and worse, and worse.

Scientology has a long history of spastic, sweaty spokespersons with creepy laughs who eventually crack under the pressure and leave the organization. There was Robert Vaughn Young, who publicly renounced the church in 1989 after decades in its leadership. He was followed by Mike Rinder, an unhinged Australian bulldog who decided to stop lying for church leader David Miscavige last year and spoke out publicly about the cult's bizarre and arbitrary cruelty in June.

The latest inheritor of Young and Rinder's mantle as the unsettling public face of scientology is Tommy Davis, the head of the cult's Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles. Davis lived up to the role last week by walking out on ABC News's Martin Bashir during a Nightline interview after Bashir asked him about Xenu, the intergalactic warlord that Hubbard believed is responsible for saddling us all with a bunch of crazy body thetans.

So who is this guy, and how long before he cracks up and turns against the church like all the rest?

• He's a Hollywood scion.
  Davis, 37, is the son of actress Anne Archer and Jeffrey Davis, a real estate investor. According to Rolling Stone's Janet Reitman, Davis "freely admits to being a Hollywood rich kid. He dresses in Italian suits, drives a BMW and is addicted to his Blackberry. 'I have enough money to never work a day in my life,' he says."
• He's Tom Cruise's BFF.
  According to the Daily Beast's Kim Masters, Davis spent nearly a decade as Cruise's "personal, full-time, assigned Scientology handler." Claire Headley, a former Scientologist who left the cult five years ago, tells Masters: "'He filtered everything, reported on what [Cruise] was doing to [Church of Scientology leader] David Miscavige.' Officially, Davis was assigned to the church's president's office in the Celebrity Centre, she continues, but he was essentially with Cruise full-time from the late 1990s until 2005." Davis worked intimately with Miscavige on the deeply strange Tom Cruise tribute video that was leaked to Gawker last year.
• He goes for stunts.
  When the BBC's John Sweeney decided to make a documentary about Scientology two years ago for Panorama, Davis and his then-colleague Rinder decided to make a "counter-documentary," and succeeded in goading Sweeney into an angry outburst that they caught on camera and distributed widely in order to discredit him. Davis harangued Sweeney mercilessly in the middle of Scientology's graphic "Psychiatry: Industry of Death" exhibit, and Sweeney later said of his enraged response: "I felt they were trying to control my mind." In the course of the same documentary, Davis walked out of an interview after Sweeney called Scientology a "sinister cult." After walking out on Bashir last week, Davis reportedly showed up unannounced at ABC News headquarters less than an hour before Nightline's airtime and demanded that the piece be spiked. He was rebuffed.
• He probably doesn't know what he's talking about.
  While Davis has said in the past that he is "familiar with" the "confidential scriptures" of Scientology that tell the story of Xenu, he's also told CNN's John Roberts that talk of "space parasites" is "unrecognizable to me." Discussions of Xenu are strictly verboten among Scientologists who haven't yet reached, and paid for, the OT-III—or Operating Thetan, level three—step on the cult's "bridge to total freedom," during which Xenu's exploits are revealed. Members are told that if they hear about Xenu before their minds are properly prepared, it will make them retarded, insane, or even kill them. Masters speculates that Davis' dumbfounded reaction to Bashir's question may have been genuine:

  Headley suspects Tommy Davis has never participated in upper-level training in which the story of Xenu would have actually been revealed. She thinks that may be why he walked out of the Nightline interview when asked about it. "In Scientology, no one can talk about it, whether you've done it or not," she says. "If you talk about it when you're not up to that level, you can be banned from ever doing it."

  Davis wouldn't tell her whether he'd reached OT-III, but according to a partial database of Scientology course completions gleaned from announcements in church publications, he hasn't.

• He's a "drug revert" and all around troublemaker.
  Masters says Davis has a reputation for mischief. He was a "happy-go-lucky" teen who was caught smoking pot, which makes him in church parlance a "drug revert" and should have barred him from serving in the cult's leadership. Davis denies being a revert. But he has, according to Masters, gotten into more recent trouble with his superiors. After the BBC flap, Masters says, he briefly "blew" from the Sea Org and went AWOL, an infraction that earned him a stint cleaning toilets in the church's Clearwater, Fla., international headquarters—though Masters doesn't use the term, it certainly sounds like Davis was shunted off to the "Rehabilitation Project Force," the church's punitive gulag for staff members who fall out of line. Davis' former friend, ex-Scientologist Jason Beghe, told the Village Voice last year that he could see from the look on Davis' face during a CNN interview that he'd been RFP'd.
• He probably won't last long.
  Davis hasn't been doing a great job. The Nightline interview was another in a string of embarrassments for the church, and Paul Haggis' high-profile defection over the weekend—announced in an open letter to Davis—is likely not sitting well with Miscavige. Davis' job is to "handle" anyone who would do harm to the church's reputation, and his tenure thus far has been marked by a string of pile-ups—angry confrontations; Haggis' defection; John Travolta's acknowledgment that, contrary to church dogma, autism is real; the St. Petersburg Times' devastating series detailing the revelations of high-profile defectors about Miscavige's violent and insane regime. He also has personal relationships with people who've left the church—he worked with Rinder, and was close friends with Beghe—and has left the reservation before. How much abuse and lying can he take before he follows them out the door?

The Church of Scientology has had a string of particularly bad press lately: there was that entire report on one of their most public members, John Travolta, wanting to maybe leave it behind, and the scary, staunch out-and-out denial put out by his flack.

Now, there're a bunch of defectors coming out of the woodwork to talk to one of Scientology's most mainstream critics, the St. Petersburg Times. Much of the criticism from defectors is still being lobbed squarely at Miscavige. Many of them are being reported by the SPT as feeling more secure in coming out now that high ranking defectors - the ones previously interviewed by the paper - are telling their story. One of the more frightening parts:

(Steve) Hall joined the church marketing unit in 1987, which brought him into more frequent contact with Miscavige, who holds the title Chairman of the Board, or COB. Hall said it was a shock the first time he saw Miscavige attack an executive, Ray Mithoff. The second time was like something out of a cartoon. Hall says Miscavige came up behind two seated executives - Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre - grabbed their heads and banged them together. Then he ground them against each other. Lesevre had blood coming out of his ear.

This story corroborates earlier reports, though surely, you can look at any of this stuff with a healthy amount of skepticism: a newspaper has a great scoop on a story, because they're located within immediate proximity of it. The SPT has a long history with Scientology, and has always been coming up with this stuff. But Scientology seems to take the SPT's claims very, very seriously, and each time, their denials of their articles get more vehement, which, of course, the paper runs in full.

The Church of Scientology provided 25 affidavits and declarations from current and former church executives and staffers who uniformly describe David Miscavige as a kind, compassionate, inspiring leader who never has been violent or abusive, physically or mentally. Yael Lustgarten's statement was typical. "In all the times I have worked with Mr. Miscavige or seen him working with others, I have never known him to be furious, mad, pissed off, much less hit, punch, kick, slap, choke, push, or inflict any form of abuse," wrote Lustgarten, who left the church staff in 2004 after 18 years. "I never witnessed that, ever."

So, essentially, the conflict with reporting on Scientology boils down to: ex-members talking, and the Church of Scientology trotting out denials and members who talk about what a gem Miscavige is.

Maybe if there was video or audio of this kind of thing, somewhere - a definitive audio/visual presentation of Miscavage's insanity - like so many of the other internal videos Scientology's tried to keep under wraps, stories like this one:

Miscavige punished top staffers Norman Starkey and Greg Wilhere, ordering them to camp out in tents for days in a high, open area of the mountainside base, near the Bonnie View mansion built for Hubbard. They were assigned hard labor and forced to shower with a garden hose.

This one:

As many as 400 staffers were summoned to the mess hall, where a small group of staffers were given special seats of dishonor. Church executives would introduce them with scorching assessments of their recent performance. "They had to get up one at a time into a microphone and confess their crimes," said Jeff Hawkins, who left the Sea Org in 2005. The crowd screamed and jeered.

And this one:

Miscavige drew close. "We're standing there sort of at attention. He looks at me, he looks at Rinder. He looks at me, he looks back at Rinder. And then suddenly, with violence, he flashed his arms up and grabbed Mike Rinder's head and body-slammed his head into the cherry wood cabinets. "He lifted Mike Rinder nearly off of his feet and smashed his head into the wall, and he banged his head into the wall three times, just BANG, BANG, BANG!"

would be viewed with significantly less skepticism. And if it's any incentive, I'm sure my boss is willing to pony up for one. It's the one piece of the puzzle that's missing, and I don't doubt we're the only ones who want to see it.

Strength in their numbers: More Church of Scientology defectors come forward with accounts of abuse [St. Petersburg Times]

Church of Scientology's response: 'Character assassination' by liars [St. Petersburg Times]

Maybe people who have a lot of money and want to give it away? Little children who are looking for things in dark, scary tunnels? It's hard to tell.

The bottom line is, even if you don't know it, you're depressed. Or, at the very least, you have some very serious emotional problems. And that's why Scientology is here.

"But is there some way you can sell me on the idea of Scientology in the vaguest, creepiest terms possible, answering all and none of my questions at the same time?" you ask?

Sure!

For more hilarious commercials, go here.

The three-part expose, which continues tomorrow and on Tuesday, had Times reporters out doing serious nose-to-the-grindstone reporting, gathering history, interviews, and sitting for hours with Scientology flacks and reps. They published plenty of material Scientology gave them, including a letter from Miscavige about him not being interviewed for the article, though the Times asserts that they "first requested an interview with Mr. Miscavige on May 13, and offered to meet with him in person, or interview him by telephone at any time since."

The St. Petersburg Times has a deep history with Scientology. The paper, a neighbor by about thirty minutes to the church's Clearwater headquarters, has had a long history of covering Scientology. Freedom, a magazine working as a mouthpiece for Scientology, once ran a piece on the St. Petersburg Times having a glass ceiling on women and minorities after accusing them of inflammatory coverage.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Notable: Scientology sat down with St. Petersburg Times reporters for 25 hours trying to debunk the defectors' tales of Miscavige. They even went to far to prepare them binders of the private confessions and ethics files - yeah, ethics files - of former members. One commenter writes in on their website: "As a former Scientologist of 20 years, its sad to see that the chruch would stoop to using members confessionals against them. How can anyone trust anything they say if they violate their own teachings."

In the report, Marty Rathbun, a former Scientologist, notes that Miscavige was a "deteriorating spiral" after he was named in an amended complaint against Scientology in the civil suit over the death of Lisa McPherson. According to Rathbun, he became "violent and irrational," going to so far as to assault and punch other Scientology executives from their International Council, including Marc Yager (chairman of Scientology's "Watchman Committee") and Mike Rinder (a former Scientology spokesman). Rinder was supposed to put a BBC story about Miscavige hitting staffers to rest. Two years ago, he flat-out denied it. Now, he confirms. Rinder was also the spokesperson who issued Scientology's denial in the infamous suicide of Scientology member Noah Lottick. Rinder blamed Lottick's Scientology-questioning parents on their son's death. Nothing about Lottick appears in the article, but there're two more days of this thing to get through. Tom De Vocht, who used to oversee the Clearwater headquarters, got slapped around by Miscavige as well. He came forward to speak about it after defecting for the Times, too.

Same with Amy Scobee, a former high-ranking Scientologist who'd been with the church since she was 14. Scobee used to work out of the LA headquarters in a cubical that backed up into a conference room Miscavige used. She told Times reporters about how she saw Miscavige jump on the table and assult members sitting around it. Rathbun was there when Miscavige wanted to get "offloads" done, once: getting rid of and demoting the members Miscavige felt had committed "crimes against humanity." Rathbun watched as Miscavige - scoring the meeting to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" - turned all the chairs against the table, and had members violently tearing at each other to get into them. This prompted Rathbun to make a literal escape from the church.

Scientology rounded up everyone, it seems, to help pitch in to their defense against the St. Petersburg Times's report. By their effort alone, you can tell how seriously they took whatever the St. Petersburg Times has that they absolutely don't want out there (on first appearance: all of it). For example, they flew in Rathbun, Rinder, and Tom De Vocht's ex-wives to debunk their stories. The wives' retorts are pretty vicious.

Church spokesmen, executives, attorneys and others flew in from around the country to meet with reporters in Clearwater. The parade started with ex-wives of the three male defectors. All three are Scientologists still. Each praised Miscavige's visionary leadership and said their ex-husbands can't be trusted. Jennifer Linson said her ex, Tom De Vocht, had a reckless streak. Anne Joasem said her ex, Marty Rathbun, "lives for war.'' Cathy Rinder said her ex is so out of touch with their children he doesn't know his 24-year-old son has skin cancer.

There's much, much more, but the most startling revelation is the culture of violence that Miscavige has cultivated throughout the church. If a body-blocking, cutthroat game of musical chairs scored to Queen isn't enough to help you form an opinion about the place - if the mere claim of it isn't enough to help you form an opinion about the place - well, there's plenty where that came from.

Scientology: The Truth Rundown [St. Petersburg Times]

Previously:

Scientology Hates Psychiatry, Loves Its Ads
Time To Audit Scientologys Anti-Medicine Stance
John Travlota Defying Scientology, Acknowledged Son's Autism
The Cruise Indoctrination Video Scientology Tried To Suppress
The History of Xenu As Explained By L. Ron Hubbard In 8 Minutes

• Previously: The Cruise Indoctrination Video Scientology Tried To Suppress
• Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography [Amazon]
• Church of Scientology Statement