"The Hole" is the name of a detention buildingalso known as the SP Hall, the SP Hole, the A to E Room, or the CMO Int trailersoperated by the Church of Scientology on Gold Base, a private compound near the town of Hemet, California. Dozens of its senior executives have been confined within the building for months or years. It consists of a set of double-wide trailers within a Scientology compound, joined together to form a suite of offices which were formerly used by the Church's international management team. According to former members of Scientology and media reports, from 2004, the Church's leader David Miscavige sent dozens of senior Scientology executives to the Hole. The Tampa Bay Times described it in a January 2013 article as:
The executives confined at the Hole are reported to have numbered up to 100 of the most senior figures in Scientology's management, including the Church of Scientology International's President, Heber Jentzsch. Individuals are said to have spent months or even years there. After a few managed to escape the Hole and Scientology, they gave accounts of their experiences to the media, the courts and the FBI, leading to widespread publicity about the harsh conditions that they had allegedly endured. The Church of Scientology has denied those accounts. It says that "the Hole does not exist and never has" and states that nobody had been held against their will. However, it acknowledges that its members are subjected to "religious discipline, a program of ethics and correction entered into voluntarily as part of their religious observances".
Background
The facility known as the Hole is located on the Church of Scientology's Gold Base, built on the site of a resort called Gilman Hot Springs in the California town of San Jacinto. The base covers bisected by a public highway, Gilman Springs Road, just off California State Route 79. It was secretly acquired by Scientology in 1978 under the alias of the "Scottish Highland Quietude Club". Scientology established a secret base there which was staffed by members of the Sea Org, an inner core of Scientologists which is said to number some five to seven thousand people. There are now two Sea Org bases in the compound: Gold, which houses the Church's in-house film studio Golden Era Productions, and Int, the Church's international headquarters, though in practice the whole site is usually called Gold Base.
Members of the Sea Org are subject to a rigid code of discipline known as "Scientology ethics and justice" which is enforced by Ethics Officers. Scientologists are encouraged to look out for any fellow members violating ethics codes and to submit "Knowledge Reports" on any violations they spot. If the ethics codes are violated, a "trial" by a Committee of Evidence can lead to punishments such as assignment to the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF). Such punishments, which can last for months or years, typically consist of a regime of physical labor and lengthy daily confessions of "evil purposes". Such assignments can also be received for performing work poorly, showing negative personality indicators (doubts, hostility etc.) or causing trouble. Individuals assigned in this way are kept isolated and prohibited from having contact with other members of Scientology and the public.
According to Marc and Claire Headley, two Scientologists who left the Church in 2005, residents at the base are not permitted to leave without the permission of a supervisor and have to work at least sixteen hours a day, from 8:00a.m. to past midnight, with shorter hours on Sundays and little time for socializing. Communications with the outside world are effectively cut off; cellphones and Internet access are generally banned, mail is censored and passports are kept in a locked filing cabinet. The perimeter of the base is closely guarded around the clock. It is ringed with high fences that are topped with spikes and razor wire and monitored by inward-facing motion sensors to detect anyone trying to climb out of the compound. The Tampa Bay Times reported that dozens of workers tried to escape from the basesome of them repeatedlybut were caught and returned by Sea Org "pursuit teams". The escapees are said to have been subjected to isolation, interrogation and punishment on their return to the compound.
Origin
Defectors from Scientology say that from around 2002, Church leader David Miscavige began to publicly slap, kick, punch or shove executives at the base who had angered him. John Brousseau, the estate manager at Gold Base and a veteran Sea Org member, said that Miscavige repeatedly faulted his subordinates' work, "constantly berating them, nitpicking everything they're doing, pointing out inadequacies, ineffectiveness, lack of results, blaming it all on them and their inability to do anything right, and on the other hand saying how he's got to do everything himselfhe's the only one who can do anything right." High-level meetings became tense affairs punctuated by "profane, belittling rants". According to emails said to have come from Miscavige's "Communicator"the personal assistant responsible for passing on transcribed messages from the leaderhe routinely berated subordinates with terms such as "CSMF" (meaning "Cock-sucking motherfucker") and "YSCOHB" (meaning "You suck cock on Hollywood Boulevard").
A practice called "overboarding" was reintroduced as a further method of enforcing discipline on the base. It had been devised during the 1960s when Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was living aboard a former Irish Sea cattle ferry Royal Scotman [sic] (later Apollo), in which he roamed the Mediterranean at the head of a small fleet of ships crewed by Sea Org members. In response to perceived violations, Scientologists were thrown over the side of the ship; sometimes they were bound and blindfolded before being tossed overboard. Scientology spokesmen describe the practice as "a Sea Org ritual akin to traditions in other religious orders" and "part of ecclesiastical justice".
Some Scientology churches (or "orgs") adopted a land-based version of overboarding by making staff members stand against a wall while other Scientologists threw buckets of water at them, but the practice was largely abandoned in the 1970s. According to author Janet Reitman, Miscavige reintroduced it in the 2000s and ordered dozens of senior executives to go outdoors in the middle of the night and assemble at the base's swimming pool or its muddy lake. They would then jump or be pushed into the water, often in freezing conditions, while fully clothed and with Miscavige watching. Scientology acknowledges that overboarding took place but characterises it as part of its "ecclesiastical justice" system for dealing with poor performance.
According to Reitman, in the late fall of 2004 Miscavige called together 70 senior Scientology executives in a pair of double-wide trailers normally used as the international management team's offices. They were ordered to play a game of musical chairs in the management conference room. Those who failed to get a chair when the music stopped would be "offloaded" from the base, away from their spouses and children, to languish in the most remote and unpleasant locations in Scientology's empire. As Queen's Greatest Hits was played, the competition for seats became increasingly fierce: "By the time the number had dwindled to twenty, people were throwing one another against the walls, ripping seats from one another's hands, wrestling one another to the floor." At the end of the contest, Miscavige ordered that all the executives were to stay in the conference room and sleep under the tables until further notice. They stayed there for the next few days, with occasional deliveries of food, before being released. Scientology's then chief spokesman, Tommy Davis, has acknowledged that the "musical chairs" incident occurred and says that it was "intended to demonstrate how disruptive wholesale changes could be on an organization" but dismisses the accounts of threats and violence.
Later in 2004, according to Reitman, a purge was carried out of staff at the base. Hundreds were sent to the RPF while dozens of others were offloaded and expelled from the Sea Org with huge "freeloader bills" presented to them for Scientology services they had received over the years. Dozens of senior executives were accused of being "suppressive persons". They were said to have been confined in the management team offices and ordered to carry out the "A to E steps", a set of penances intended to demonstrate that they had repented of their "crimes" and reformed. In particular, they were to confess and identify which of them were "defying [Miscavige] and sabotaging Scientology with their incompetence". The management offices, which had formerly been referred to as "the CMO Int trailer", became known as the "A to E Room," the "SP Hall", the "SP Hole", and finally "the Hole".
Life in the Hole
From 2004 to 2007, the number of people confined in the Hole increased from 40 to up to 100. They slept in cots or sleeping bags, squeezed into every available floor space or on desktops. Men would sleep around the conference table while women slept in cubicles and small offices around the main conference room. They were so crowded that there was barely any room to move, according to one of those present: "Everyone sleeping with only about six inches on either side. Above you. Below you. Getting up in the middle of the night, you'd disturb everyone." They were only allowed to leave to attend Scientology events or to be taken to a shower in a nearby maintenance garage, to which they were taken two at a time under guard. Food was brought to them on golf carts from the Gold Base mess hall, as the executives were not allowed to eat with the rest of the staff, and they were only given ten to fifteen minutes to eat. According to one of the executives, the food was "like leftovers, slop, bits of meat, soupy kind of leftovers thrown into a pot and cooked and barely edible." The building was said to be infested with ants and on several occasions the electricity was turned off, causing the temperature inside to reach due to the lack of air conditioning.
Brousseau commented that when he visited the Hole occasionally, "you could smell that people live here, people sleep here." He saw the executives being marched elsewhere on the base to take showers; his impression was that "they looked like they were being marched to the gallowsthey just looked lifeless, with no purpose. Very hang-dog, droopy shoulders, slouchy, very sad, inward-looking creatures." Brousseau said that they were only allowed out "at certain times of day that would be adjudicated to be the least likely time when DM [Miscavige] would run into them if he was on the property. They would march out to Old Gilman House to take a shower and come back because they had no shower facilities inside the Hole. Later that got upgraded to let them go down to the garage." Sometimes executives were allowed out for a short time to attend Scientology events, but many ended up spending months or even years in the Hole.
The individuals who were later named by the media as being held in the Hole represented a who's who of Scientology's top management. They included Debbie Cook, the head of the Church of Scientology Flag Service Organization; Heber Jentzsch, the President of the Church of Scientology International; Guillaume Lesevre, the Executive Director International and the church's top management official; Mark Rathbun, the Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center; Wendell Reynolds, the International Finance Director; Mike Rinder, the Commanding Officer of the Office of Special Affairs; Kurt Weiland, director of external affairs for the Office of Special Affairs; Marc Yager, the Commanding Officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization; and Norman Starkey, the former captain of Hubbard's ship, the Apollo.