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‘Slave wage Scientologists made gifts for Tom Cruise’
Former cult member tells how he made custom motorbikes and a car for $50 per week
Members of the Church of Scientology worked for $50 a week to customise motorcycles, a car and an airport hangar for Tom Cruise, according to new testimony from a disaffected member of the cult.
John Brousseau has told the New Yorker that he expended thousands of man hours so that his former brother-in-law, Scientology chief David Miscavige, could give the items to Cruise as gifts.
Brousseau was a Scientologist for 30 years until he left in April last year. His defection caused a certain amount of consternation among the cult's members because of his seniority and exposure to sensitive projects involving Cruise.
Brousseau said: "I was getting paid $50 dollars a week. And I'm supposed to be working for the betterment of mankind."
Instead, says Brousseau, he spent an inordinate amount of time working for the betterment of Miscavige and Cruise.
It all began in 2005, he claims, when Miscavige showed Cruise one of his motorbikes that Brousseau had customised for his briother-in-law. It was plating with nickel and painted "candy-apple red".
Cruise was impressed and asked Miscavige if Brousseau would do a similar job on his own bikes. Cruise and his wife Katie Holmes are pictured above at a War of the Worlds premiere in Los Angeles in 2005 on the Honda Rune that Brousseau worked on.
Other jobs done for Cruise as gifts from Miscavige, by Scientologists earning $50 a week, include decking out the Hollywood star's airport hangar with giant signs and stripping a Ford Excursion people carrier down to its frame and painstakingly building it up again to a luxurious standard.
Brousseau's attention to detail is spectacular: the Ford's interiors were beautifully laminated with eucalyptus and the car even included a secret compartment for a Mont Blanc pen which itself was laminated with the same wood.
The Church of Scientology and Cruise's lawyer denied Brousseau's story. A spokesman for the cult said: "None of the Church staff involved were coerced in any way to assist Mr. Cruise. Church staff, and indeed Church members, hold Mr. Cruise in very high regard and are honoured to assist him.
"Whatever small economic benefit Mr. Cruise may have received from the assistance of Church staff pales in comparison to the benefits the Church has received from Mr. Cruise's many years of volunteer efforts for the Church."
But unfortunately for them, Brousseau took so much pride in his work that he photographed it copiously. His account is published, with pictures, on the blog of Mark Rathbun, another former Scientologist.
In it he reveals how he had had his eye on the eucalyptus tree he used on the Ford since 1981. Of that project, he writes: "I spend the next six months completely tearing [the car] apart and rebuilding it... About 2,000 man-hours personally by me. I make it into a custom Limo like no other ever built.
"I am proud of it and all the other things I worked on, but I am ashamed of who they were for and why. It is not what I thought I would be doing when I joined [Scientology]." ·
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What is really missing: Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is one of the most translated and read authors of our time, be it his fiction or non-fictions books. Contrary to the New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, L. Ron Hubbard never even tried to make a living out of bias and rumors but is known for straight and honest communication with his readers and left it up to them to make up their own mind. As he said, 'I have led an adventurous life and it would possibly be entertaining to read, but I doubt such a work would shed any background light on my researches and would not clarify my intentions or why I developed Dianetics and Scientology. My intentions in life did not include making a story of myself. I only wanted to know man and understand him. I did not really care if he did not understand me, so long as he understood himself. I was the lesser part of my project. Some say this is unfortunate, but I do not find it so. I did not live to be understood, but to understand.' How right he was when he wrote this in 1966.
Cruise comes across as a very likeable man. The best con-men do.