Bruce Hines: Scientology has always protected abusers and always will

[Dark secrets in the South Tyrol]

[While we have a day off from deliberations at the Danny Masterson retrial, we have this treat to tide us over, the latest vivid narrative from Bruce Hines.]

I wrote the following about three years ago. I have been doubtful that it would be of interest to most people. It concerns events that happened almost 40 years ago in a relatively small and insignificant corner of the Scientology world. More recently, however, in light of the criminal case against Danny Masterson, it seems more relevant.

I had been in Copenhagen for over three months. My training there was complete. I was a new staff member in a Scientology “mission” in Heilbronn, Germany, and had been sent to Denmark to take courses to learn my job. In the international network of Scientology, missions had the lowest status. That means that the types of training and auditing (an unusual one-on-one practice) that a mission could sell were limited. In Copenhagen was the most senior organization in continental Europe. Only there were many of the highest levels of Scientology available. My boss in Germany had decided I should go there to get the information I would need to perform the duties of my post. The subject matter of Scientology is extraordinarily complicated and there was more for me to learn than I might with a few days of on-the-job training or with the courses that were available in the mission.

It was mid-summer in 1975. The weather was beautiful. I had quite enjoyed being in Copenhagen. It had been decided that I would travel by train from there to southern Germany. At that time, there were only two other members of the mission, Werner and Doris, a married couple. They had already gone to South Tyrol, in the Alps of northern Italy, where they were offering “holiday courses.” Accompanying them was their 3-year-old son, Christopher. I went first to Stuttgart, where I spent the night at a friend’s place, and from there, the next morning, took another train to a nearby town. There, I met a woman named Herta, whom I had met a couple of years earlier when I was taking introductory Scientology courses in Stuttgart. She had agreed to drive me the rest of the way to South Tyrol. I didn’t know her very well.

Herta was, I’m guessing, in her early thirties. She was a school teacher. Her demeanor was pleasant and somewhat reserved. I would have said that she was a bit conservative socially, maybe even somewhat schoolmarmish. I hadn’t seen her for several months. When I met her at the train station, the first, very obvious, thing about her was that she was pregnant. This caught me by surprise. I knew that she wasn’t married.

We got into her Citroën and set off on the drive to South Tyrol. It was one of those small Citroëns, popular in those years, with rounded fronts and backs, kind of like a VW Beetle, and about the same size. Our destination was a tiny village named Kapron, high in the Alps. It was in northern Italy, and just a kilometer or two from the Austrian border. It was approximately a five-hour trip, through the states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria in Germany, through Austria over two mountain passes, and into Italy. We chatted some along the way, but were mostly quiet.

We arrived in the late afternoon. We were staying in a house owned by that couple, for whom I had worked less than two weeks before going to Copenhagen. I think they were able to buy that house, a year or two earlier, because Doris’s parents were to some degree wealthy. Werner did not have money of his own. The village had ten or twelve houses situated close to each other. Most of the residents were dairy farmers. The lush, green alpine valleys were perfect for cows to graze in during the warm months. In the winter, when there was a lot of snow, the cows lived in barns, subsisting on hay cut from the surrounding pastures. One of the odd things, at least for me as an outsider, was that the barns were part of the houses. The cows lived on the ground floor and the people lived on a floor above.

It was explained to me that this was an efficient way to heat the buildings for humans and bovines alike. The house we stayed in had an empty barn, a small one, below our living quarters, which consisted of a living/dining room, a small kitchen, one bathroom, and one bedroom on the lower level, and three bedrooms upstairs. It was very rustic. The only heating for the whole house was a fireplace enclosed in a stone structure, accessible from the living room and from the kitchen. All cooking was done on a cast iron, wood- fired, stove. I was put in the bedroom on the lower level. Herta, I believe, was staying in a nearby inn, which is where the people who were traveling there to take a course were also staying.

Those staying in the house were the mission staff, a babysitter for Christopher, and some people from Stuttgart who were there to help give the courses. I came to realize that Werner was the father of Herta’s baby. I don’t remember how I found that out. It had to do with the fact that Doris, who was usually very easy to get along with, was acting pissed off or sullen much of the time. It is totally beyond me why Herta traveled there to take a course under those circumstances. Some months after that, Doris gave birth to their second son, Nikolai, and I’m pretty sure that she was also pregnant at the time.

Werner was a brazen philanderer. I did not know that at the time, though others did. As time went on, this became increasingly clear to me. There was certainly no remorse on his part that he had gotten Herta pregnant.

Life went on for the following couple of days without incident. We were involved in various activities, like gathering wood for fires, building fires for cooking, shopping for food for everyone, delivering Scientology introductory courses, cleaning, driving to the inn where the course room was, and the like. Then we got word that two people would be arriving from the Mission Office Worldwide. They were coming to investigate some reports that they had received about our mission and especially about Werner. This was a big deal.

The Scientology organization internationally is, and was at that time, elaborate. There are different types of local groups, with each type authorized to offer certain services, arranged in hierarchical networks. In 1975 the world headquarters was on a ship that sailed around to various ports in the Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas. Prior to the ship taking on that role in about 1967 or ‘68, the international center was at Saint Hill in England. The central control points for Scientology missions, as distinct from “orgs,” “advanced orgs,” and management groups for various continents, had remained in England at that time. Each mission was supposed to send weekly reports to this office with various statistics, such as the amount of income, then number of new people, and aspects of delivery (like the number of people taking a course that week, the number of hours of auditing delivered, and such). Additionally, each mission was supposed to send 10 percent of their income to the worldwide office. If someone observed that a mission was not following the prescribed policies, or was acting unethically, the observer was obligated to send in written reports to more senior Scientology officials, including the Mission Office Worldwide.

I was just learning about the many and varied rules and policies that governed the behavior of individuals, missions, orgs, and staff members in the world of Scientology. In later years, as I became more and more involved, I learned a lot about such things. That mission where I had joined staff just a few months earlier was violating many of those policies. And Werner already had a reputation in Europe of being a flouter of rules, to such an extent that when the central authority received reports about Werner’s mission, they sent investigators all the way to the Italian Alps to check into things.

On that trip, there were a few people working for the Heinzels in one capacity or another, and maybe fifteen or twenty public Scientologists who had traveled from Germany to enjoy a holiday while taking a short course. We were all interviewed by the two people who had come to try to get more information about whatever had been reported. I didn’t have much to say. I was new and had not yet experienced the crazy stuff that went on in that family. I was not sure about Werner being the father of Herta’s baby, though I was starting to have my suspicions, and said nothing about that.

A married man, who held an official position in Scientology, having an affair with another woman was considered a serious offense. In the highest levels of the command structure, where all staff members are in the “Sea Organization,” a person caught doing that would have been sent to a “rehabilitation” camp or possibly excommunicated. Likely, there were also financial irregularities that had been reported, as Werner played loose with money.

Evidently no one else had anything negative to say either. The investigators were there for a day and then they were gone. Werner said they found that everyone was having a positive experience. Neither Werner nor Doris nor Herta must have said anything about the affair. I have wondered what had been reported that warranted this visit, and whether they asked about any specific transgressions. Those people acting on behalf of the Mission Office Worldwide should have dug deeper. A couple of years later Werner was kicked out of Scientology. But for a time life went on as though everything was fine.

Later, I learned of other things about that Scientology group, and about Werner specifically, that in retrospect are shocking.

The following spring, in 1976, a family had come to South Tyrol to take a holiday course and to receive some Scientology auditing. In that family was a daughter who was 12 or 13 years old. That family abruptly departed one day. It turned out that Werner had gotten her alone, talked nicely to her, and kissed her. He was trying to seduce her. Fortunately she somehow got away and spoke up about it. I don’t know if Werner ever had to face the consequences of this despicable act.

Another time when we were in South Tyrol, Werner was talking to me and another guy named Paul late one night in the main room of the old farmhouse where we were living. This would have been a couple of months after the investigators had visited. In essence, he was bragging about his sexual exploits. In doing so, he was describing how a particular concept in the teachings of Scientology applied to his conquest of women.

I will try to briefly explain this concept, which is one that all people who get to know Scientology learn about early on, and then study in more detail if they progress to higher levels.

The concept is referred to as the “emotional tone scale.” The idea is that emotions can be considered to lie on a graded scale. The positions on this scale correspond to states of being or “tones.” The higher on the scale, the better. Supposedly a person moves up and down this scale as they go through life, and they pass through or experience the corresponding emotions as they do so. So, for example, apathy is considered to be a low tone and cheerfulness a high tone. But one can’t just jump from apathy to cheerfulness. One would have to pass through intervening emotions on the scale, even if briefly. Some of the main ones, going from low to high, are apathy, grief, fear, covert hostility, anger, antagonism, boredom, mild interest, strong interest, and cheerfulness. The ones from boredom and above are considered to be positive emotions, meaning that they promote survival, and the ones below boredom are negative, leading the person towards death. “Up tone” and “down tone” are common expressions used to describe a person’s mood.

I’ll add here that I no longer believe in this construct. I don’t think emotions fall on such a scale, nor that one moves through emotions in a set sequence. Such a concept is contrary to what I have experienced and observed. Also, emotions aren’t positive or negative – they are responses to events that happen in life. However, Scientologists think this emotional tone scale is true because the founder said so. Anyway, back to the evening in South Tyrol with Werner. He was describing to us that when he was in the process of seducing a woman, a phase would often occur where she became sad or fearful or angry or antagonistic towards him. That meant, he explained, that she was coming up tone. She had to pass through the negative emotions in order to reach the positive area of the scale. Werner felt that he then had to persist in his advances to get her through the lower emotions and into higher ones. Then she would be amenable to having sex, according to his twisted thinking.

Werner had completed “OT levels” (which supposedly meant that he had attained higher states of being), was a trained auditor (had done the “Saint Hill Special Briefing Course” in Copenhagen), and was the leader of a Scientology mission. There were very few people with that status in the German-speaking area in those years. He was a big strong guy with a quick temper and an ability to be very charming. I felt that because of his training and “case level,” he had much more knowledge and awareness than me. I tended to buy his bullshit.

I have learned a lot since then. I have been able to shed years of conditioning and indoctrination that I experienced in Scientology. I believe that I can view things more realistically and rationally. Though I am embarrassed to admit it, I now realize that in reality the women in those situations were resisting and, in one fashion or another, were saying no. And, in fact, Werner was repeatedly overpowering those poor women and committing rape. And, because he was to some degree an “opinion leader” and a senior Scientologist in that area, he was able to get away with it.

— Bruce Hines

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