"Scientology - Abuse At the Top"

Scientology - Abuse at the Top (Amy Scobee)

This is kinda the anti-My Billion Year Contract. Scobee's not fucking around here; I finished the whole book in a few hours in the airport terminal and my hotel room. Scobee is amazingly blase about the whole thing. The book basically starts with her getting sexually assaulted at 14 by a Scientologist, and it doesn't get any more cheerful from there. Scobee bounces around the RPF (at one point being assigned there for two years), getting weird punishments like having to eat nothing but rice and beans for months and months, and getting verbally and emotionally abused by David Miscavige, the head of Scientology (and witinesses him physically abusing other staff members first hand). Scobee must be one tough cookie, because none of this seems to do more than make her mad, and the typical Scientologist cult techniques (bad and not enough food, not enough sleep, disconnecting people from friends and family) don't have the desired effect. At the end of the book she blows and there's as happy an ending as you can get when the cult you escaped after 20 years blackmails your mother into never talking to you again unless you give them $250,000 and dumps you on the street in your mid 40's with $100 in your pocket. I'd recommend reading the book, but maybe not as your first Scientologist memior; Scobee doesn't go into the kind of context you'd get from a "Blown for Good", and you might want to read one of those first.

Grade: B
Scientology Jargon-O-Meter reading: 7 (Scobee uses extensive acronyms and jargon like "being in a treason condition" or "up-stat"; These are explained in the end-notes, but unless you're already familiar with these concepts, you will need to attempt a guess at her meaning from context or flip to the endnotes every other page.)