I know the dark side of Scientology…I almost lost my friend when she became obsessed with it
I knew Scientology was in trouble when the media moved on from the usual silly gossip about its celebrity members to much darker, disturbing issues at the heart of the movement — issues, as I have come personally to understand, that actually matter, Jonny Jacobsen writes in Herald Scotland.
After a Paris court last month convicted several Scientologists and two organisations associated with the movement in France of organised fraud, and amid other investigations in France looking at a suicide and an alleged abduction, Oscar-winning film-maker Paul Haggis, a long-time member, quit Scientology.
Haggis, who wrote and directed Crash, denounced the practice of “disconnection“, which sees members forced to cut off contact with anyone — even their loved ones — if they are deemed an enemy of Scientology.
In Edinburgh in the early 1990s, I found out just what the practice of disconnection could do to ordinary people when a close friend became involved in Scientology. It was an experience which marked me so profoundly that I have been tracking the movement ever since…