Going Clear, Part 13 – IRS, Actual Malice on Wright’s behalf.

Going Clear, Part 13 – IRS, Actual Malice on Wright’s behalf.

The IRS put Scientology through such unprecedented scrutiny, over a 2 year period. It was like, you know, you talk about an audit, it was like the audit from hell that went on for 2 years. OK?

And they were obsessed with tracing every penny that went to anything that had any logical or illogical connections to Scientology or Scientology related things. That’s what led to every single entity in the world that had any kind of connection whatsoever being examined to the core, which wound up with the—you know, down to the Founder’s estate taxes and all of his accounting for you know the 10 years leading up to it, to the point where, it was evident that it wasn’t what they kept saying it was. It wasn’t some special funnel that went off and there was some other special purpose for it that was commercial, or all these things that you hear, they, they went through this, and it ended up that they ended up going, Okay. They’re all exempt.

That’s how it expanded into every single entity and activity that had anything to do with the Church. That demand was not made from the outset. He just created that. And incidentally, I’m sure I went through that with Larry Wright. But undaunted, he just, you know, don’t ever let facts get in the way of your narrative.

You know, he sets this up thing, and it’s just misleading. Wright says, “the odds against success were high. The courts had repeatedly sided with the IRS’s assertion that the Church of Scientology was a commercial enterprise”. OK? One entity for 2 years, that were 20 years old. For 2 years that happened 20 years before, right. The court had found that that church, in those years, did not pass the test on commerciality, OK?

So there was 19 more years just up to that point, in 1991, that could have been litigated and fought, okay. So, he just makes it sound like, this entity, you’re branded forever, and, OK? And it wasn’t repeated, it was just, if there was any repetition, it was just, courts of appeal, but my point is, is the statement’s completely and utterly misleading.

Not only that, there was a number of decisions that were made, that didn’t have to do with ultimate exemption or non-exemption, that were totally in Scientology’s favor and totally against the IRS, which really put the IRS in a bad position with religion in general. We were creating precedents under the Church Audit Procedures Act. He doesn’t mention any of this stuff. And I went through this with him in spades. I went through it with him in, you know, by jurisdiction, where we had suits and we had decisions, you know. In the First Circuit, in the Eleventh Circuit, in the Ninth Circuit. Different federal circuit courts, none of this stuff’s in here. All he talks about is some decision about commercialism that happened 19 years, for the years, that occurred 19 years earlier.

The reason I point this out is because he’s building this whole thing, like gosh, why did they give them exemption? He must have had a gun put to his head. Which was, which is the thing that he was trying to get me to sort of play. He wanted me to play into. And I didn’t go there. You know. I just repeatedly kept going back to the substance. And rejecting his offer to get me to say, yeah, it was all bullshit and they just did it because we kicked their butts.

Repeatedly. So he says, Miscavige and Rathbun were very much aware that the future of Scientology, if there was one, awaited the result of the IRS probe. Either the panel would rule against them, in which case the Church’s tax liability for the previous two decades would destroy it, or this is the clause, or they would fall under the gracious protection of the Freedom of Religion clause of the First Amendment, in which case, the Church of Scientology, and all of its practices, remember he’s given you 230 pages of why you should fear all of their practices, all of their practices would be sheltered by the US Constitution.

I got news. And I gave him this news. They already were. And had been, for decades, protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. This is a completely and utterly invented statement he’s making in this narrative, against all evidence, and I gave it to him.

See the more I look at this now, in a fresh unit of time, and I see what he and Gibney did on their PR rollout with Mike Rinder and Tony Ortega, you know, this whole PR line that we’re going to get the IRS to revoke the, to look at the exemption. The more I look at that, the more I see, that this whole thing was constructed with that in mind. In the book, he was setting the foundation for that.

Alright, so, you know. On that score, for hours, I went through with him, the process of what actually happened with the IRS. And how, you know, not only, there was two aspects of it. Not only was there an extraordinary amount of documentation obtained through litigation that demonstrated a class-based animus on the part of the IRS. OK. And an overreaching and unconstitutional double standard being applied to Scientology over decades.

Not only, not only did we establish that, but we also for two years went through the most stringent review that had ever been conducted in the history of the Internal Revenue Service. Of any organization, nonprofit, profit, of any kind. OK? None of that’s in here. He tells this whole narrative, and I went through this for hours with him. Hours. I went through it with him in follow up phone calls.