Mike Rinder started attending a local Church of Scientology International (CSI) center with his parents at age of five. By the time he was fresh out of high school, he signed Sea Org’s billion-year contract.
“Scientologists believe that you live more than one lifetime, and a billion-year contract [means] I am committing myself to achieving the aims of Scientology not just in this lifetime, but for all eternity,” he explains.
Eventually Rinder was promoted to Executive Director of the Office of Special Affairs, then served as Scientology’s head spokesperson, and dealt with some of the organization’s highest profile members, including Tom Cruise.
But after almost 50 years as a member, he left CSI in 2007 and has ever since publicly opposed it in film and TV documentaries. In his just released memoir “A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology,” he exposes the secret inner workings, as well as the dark, dystopian truth about the powerful organization to which he had devoted his life to. He now shares some of those stories with Kim Masters.
The Sea Organization
The Sea Org is a group of the organization’s most dedicated servants. Once Rinder signed its contract, he became part of this elite inner circle, which critics describe as Scientology’s paramilitary body as envisioned by its founder L. Ron Hubbard.
The order was inspired from the time when Hubbard served the United States Navy as an officer during World War II. His fascination thereafter continued, and once he founded the CSI, he bought ships, made its members wear uniforms and even ranked them, like the Navy.
“You start as a swamper,” Rinder says, “and you ultimately work your way up through Midshipman, Ensign, Lieutenant, all the way up to Captain,” which the de facto leader of Scientology, David Miscavige, now holds.
Before Rinder signed the contract, Hubbard had promised to train him in the most advanced Scientology techniques. Once he joined the order, he was put to swab the ships’ decks while immersing himself in its doctrines.
Fundamental doctrines
One of the basic principles of Scientology is that when something goes wrong in someone’s life, it is their fault, and they are doing Scientology wrong. But, “not only are you doing Scientology wrong, you have done something bad that has caused that to happen to you,” Rinder remarks.
Another foundational principle is that members must confess to all the wrongs in their lives. “[But] it's not just everything you did wrong in this life, it also extends back to earlier lifetimes that you may have done something wrong,” Rinder observes.
“[In] Scientology the term for it is, ‘you pulled it in,’ you created the bad circumstance that you are in because you did something bad that caused you to receive something bad,” he explains, giving an example: “It is an unshakeable truth in Scientology that if you get hit by a car, that means you hit someone with a car, [so] you have to go back and find that incident and confess to it. But if you've never driven a car, you can't find an incident where you drove [one], so you start going into past lives where you ran over someone with a stagecoach, or you squashed someone with a chariot back in Roman times.”
Being ferreted out
The way a Scientologist discovers his or her missteps is through repeated interrogations, performed through a machine-like lie detector called E-meter, which an operator “guides” a member during an auditing session.
“Scientology [guides] you to coming to an understanding of what these horrible things are that you may have done previously, that caused you to now get run over by a car,” he says.
Fair Game
And as part of the interrogation process, the organization keeps a detailed dossier on each member about their misdeeds, as well as people it perceives as being foes.
“There is a file on everybody who has ever said or done something that Scientology disagrees with, and it's kept by the Office of Special Affairs, which is the organization that I used to be in charge of,” Rinder notes.
The dossier is part of a Hubbard’s directive called Fair Game, which says “enemies of Scientology can be tricked, sued, lied to,” and even physically punished. Eventually, the term stopped being used because of bad publicity, but not the actions.
Going to “The Hole”
Rinder claims that he and other members of the organization suffered enormous psychological and even physical abuses by the hands of Hubbard’s successor, Miscavige, including being put in a makeshift prison known as “The Hole.”
“I was effectively being held prisoner with a lot of other people, and that was first really depicted in ‘Going Clear,’ in Larry Wright's book and then Alex Gibney’s wonderful documentary on HBO, which [is a] summary of the reality of Scientology.”
Once Rinder left the CSI, he was accused of being an apostate and a liar and became the organization’s biggest public enemy. He says he was followed, hacked, spied on and tracked, but that was not unique to him. There have been innumerous allegations of abuse by the organization over the years against its members, former members, (here and here) and its foes.
Tom Cruise and Scientology
Rinder’s high-ranking position at the organization gave him a window into celebrities' lives, including Cruise’s - one of the most recognizable Scientologists in the world.
He says that while filming “Eyes Wide Shut” with his then-wife Nicole Kidman, Cruise had drifted away from Scientology and Miscavige wanted to bring him back at any cost.
“[Cruise] was brought very much back into the fold to the point where he was basically persuaded that he should get rid of Pat Kingsley,” Rinder explains, so Cruise fired Kingsley, his publicist at the time.
By the time Cruise went to Oprah’s TV show and had the infamous couch jumping moment, Rinder says Cruise had increasingly become a public promoter of CSI.
“That was the greatest era of dissemination of Scientology in its history, in that more people heard about Scientology, because Tom Cruise was doing crazy stuff, than had ever probably heard about it in a short period of time,” he says.
After that, the organization also saw his spat with Matt Lauer in a positive light. “[Cruise] was saying exactly what every Scientologist believes, [that] all psychiatric drugs are bad. ‘I don't care about postpartum depression. I don't even care what drug it is,’” Rinder explains. “So from a Scientology perspective, that stuff was wonderful. This is the problem that they literally exist in a bubble.”
Rinder believes Cruise has recruited more members to Scientology than anyone else over the years.
“Tom Cruise has done an awful lot to promote Scientology to a lot of people,” Rinder adds. “But worse than that, he has promoted Scientology as something that has been incredibly helpful to him, and there are a lot of people out in the world who take the lead from movie stars about how they should live their life.”
Scientology is more exposed
Before the internet, it was harder for defectors to speak out against Scientology, and the organization’s doctrines were kept pretty much secret. Now former members are more public and have created a supportive community.
“I think that the internet has had a huge impact on not just Scientology, but any organization that relies on keeping people in the dark, both those who are still within the organization, and also those who are outside,” Rinder observes. “That has shifted the dynamic, moved the balance of power, and the reporting by Larry Wright and the film by Alex Gibney, changed things dramatically, in my view.”
As a former CSI member, Rinder has co-hosted an A&E series, “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath,” for which he won an Emmy in 2020, and he and Remini are currently co-hosting the podcast, “Scientology: Fair Game.”
His memoir “A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology” is available online and in bookstores.