Jerry Whitfield, longtime Scientology exit counselor, dies at 77

[Hana and Jerry Whitfield]

We spoke to Hana Whitfield last night, who was still in Miami, where her husband Jerry had died Sunday night after a lengthy illness. She was understandably feeling overwhelmed by everything she and Jerry have been going through, and she plans to return to her Coral Gables home for some rest. But we were grateful that she spent some time with us talking about Jerry.

For many years, from the mid 1980s, the two of them were formidable figures in the community that helps people leave Scientology and reacquaint themselves with modern life.

Jerry Whitfield was originally from Clovis, New Mexico, where he was born on January 21, 1945. Hana says he had a younger sister and two older brothers, and that he attended college and got a business degree.

In 1974, Jerry was in El Paso, Texas, and he was looking for answers to some pretty big questions.

“I wanted to know things like: What is the human spirit capable of? Is there such a thing as clairvoyance? Can it be taught? Do some people have that as a special power? Or does nobody have it? Is your soul separate from your body? Can somebody get out of their body?” Jerry told an interviewer several years ago.

And the place he went with those questions, after hearing some things about the place, was a Narconon drug rehab in El Paso, one of the rehabs run by Scientology.

“Of course Narconon jumped on it and said they had all the answers,” Hana says.

What Jerry found instead was intense, grueling work with little sleep as he became “Executive Director Narconon US,” answering to his Guardian’s Office superiors. (In those years, the 1970s, Narconon was under the GO.)

Jerry worked at the Narconon for three years before running into trouble with the GO.

“He got into ‘disrepute’ with the GO. He was not at fault. He was declared suppressive,” Hana tells us. She says that Jerry managed to get back in good standing as he went out to Los Angeles and continued his auditor training in Scientology.

By 1982, he told one interviewer, he was seeing a lot of problems with the organization, he saw many people leaving, and he also couldn’t afford Scientology’s prices anymore. He stopped paying for courses, and hung around for a couple of years more before finally leaving Scientology in 1984.

That was also the time when Hana Eltringham left Scientology. Her involvement had gone back to 1965. A couple of years later she was a captain of one of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s ships. (You may remember Hana’s rich telling of her years under Hubbard in Alex Gibney’s 2015 HBO documentary, Going Clear.)

“We met as former Scientologists,” Hana says. “I was job hunting in Los Angeles, and Jerry was working for a former Scientologist. I happened to get an interview in the same office where he was working. We met every so often and then got together later. We both had questions about Scientology. So did the other former Scientologists. It was common to band together,” she says.

They were married at the end of 1985.

Those questions about Scientology led to an attempt to put together a class-action lawsuit against the church with the help of Michael Flynn, the attorney who had handled cases for Paulette Cooper, Gerry Armstrong, and other former Scientologists.

And it was while planning that lawsuit that years of intense harassment by Scientology began, Hana says.

“The first real evidence was at the end of the first lawsuit meeting at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles. We were meeting with Flynn. It was for ex-Scientologists only. Scientology’s attorney Earle Cooley and Marty Rathbun tried to get in, but they couldn’t. After the meeting we were followed by a red car. But the police were happy to protect us. They stopped the red car, which was being driven by a Scientologist. From then on the harassment was fairly steady.”

Jerry soon became the target of a familiar Scientology ploy. Hana says that in 1987 or 1988, Sterling Management, a Scientology front operation, reported finding a written bomb threat.

“The police were called and were told that it looked like Jerry’s handwriting,” Hana says. “We were contacted by the fire chief’s private investigator, who asked us to come to a meeting. We went loaded for bear.”

They showed documents describing a similar operation that had been run against the journalist Paulette Cooper some 15 years earlier, when she was accused of sending a bomb threat to a Scientology church. “We had the Paulette Cooper program. We had videos. We met with them for four hours. At the end of it they were grateful. The private investigator was a handwriting expert, and he said that Jerry was not the culprit. But they were interested in why Scientology was so focused on us.”

In 1989, Hana and Jerry were approached by Priscilla Coates of the Cult Awareness Network. “She took us under her wing. She steered us to books that were helpful. We devoured them. Within a few months, she wanted us to do exit counseling.”

Hana says she was hesitant. “Jerry was the one who said, absolutely, that’s what we’ll do.”

The couple then began meeting with Scientologists for interventions, using their own experiences to say the things that would make a dedicated church member see the contradictions they had been conditioned to ignore.

Scientology made the job difficult as it stepped up the harassment. Hana has described to us a harrowing car chase that took place in England that she recounts vividly in a forthcoming book.

“We were being chased by four or five cars every day. We were able to do the interventions right under their noses,” she says. “There were a number like that. We were chased, we got away, and did the intervention. But other times they were successful and kept the interventions from happening.”

The harassment reached a peak when Scientology leader David Miscavige orchestrated an attempt to get Hana indicted for the death of her father in the 1960s.

“Jerry was very instrumental helping me get through that. We found a good lawyer in Joburg, and got it all taken care of,” she says. She received a letter from South Africa’s national police commissioner that there was no foundation to the claim the Scientology lawyers were pushing.

“The harassment finally stopped after we took care of that in 1994,” she says.

She and Jerry continued to help families with interventions as late as 2012 in Florida.

“We got a lot more people out of Scientology. I would say easily over 300. That’s just interventions, and not all the people we talked to over the phone,” she says.

She and Jerry will be remembered for that work. But for now, she says she’s feeling “broken.”

“It’s so raw, so fresh,” she says. “I’m just at a point of getting through it.”

We told her we completely understood. And we want to remind you that there’s a GoFundMe account that will help her with the many expenses she’s facing.

We have enjoyed warm support from Hana and Jerry for many years, and we hope that he is remembered for spending so many years educating people about Scientology’s abuses. He will be missed.

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