This was the first place I read about Debbie's conduct during the incident I mentioned in the Hole. It was a post by Marty Rathbun all the way back from March 2010 - long before Debbie's email and court testimony - on the
scientology cult website, titled
Debbie Cook - 45 Days in the Hole.
In this post, Marty said:
One day DM announced to the assembled in the Hole that Marc Yager (one time CO CMO INT/WDC Chairman) and Guillaume Lesevre (one time ED INT) were homosexual and were engaged in a gay relationship. To those who have read my full blog and Scientology-cult.com you’d know that by that time, DM had been alleging this to the entire crew for ten years. But, for Debbie, Kristie (exCO FCB) and Heber, it was news.
Debbie was there when DM announced that Tom Cruise would come the next day to “punch you guys out” if the one hundred Holee’s failed to get a confession out of Guillaume and Marc.
When DM left Jenny Linsen Devocht, Angie Blankenship, and Lisa Schroer (who were DM’s pets at the time, sort of in charge of the Hole while being Holed themselves) decided that the Holees collectively will “give some people some black eyes before Tom has to.” Russ Bellin (once CO CST) lead the charge of the bigger and stronger men in the hole who began the beat downs of Yager, Guillaume and Ray Mithoff (once Snr CS INT). The crew battered Marc, Guillaume and Ray. In the psychotic frenzy even Norman Starkey and Heber sustained some collateral damage. Debbie managed not to participate in the carnage.
When DM returned for a report, Lisa Schroer (who remained a DM pet throughout given her position as CO of Gold, that handles the only product he gives a damn about, Events) in her inimitable fashion, started embellishing the forced confessions allegedly gotten from Guillaume and Yager while under legally recognized conditions of torture. Lisa dutifully reported that Guillaume and Yager had in fact confessed to having a homosexual relationship.
Debbie tried to correct the report, interjecting that they never really confessed as Lisa was reporting. DM shut her up in a heartbeat. Once DM left, Lisa Schroer , who was a little more in charge of the Hole at the time than Jenny and Angie, briefed the Holees what a treasonous “bitch” Debbie was for “defending” Marc and Guillaume. She was accused of being “mutual out ruds” for having sided with the victims of torture. That included loud accusations from Lisa, Angie and Jenny that Debbie “must be a lesbo.”
For the next twelve hours Debbie was made to stand in a large garbage can and face one hundred people screaming at her demanding a confession as to her “homosexual tendancies”. While this was going on water was poured over her head. Signs were put around Debbie’s neck, one marked in magic marker “LESBO” while this torture proceeded. Debbie was repeatedly slapped across the face by other women in the room during the interrogation. Debbie never did break. And fittingly she was rewarded with what turned out to be a break in another sense of the word.
When I confirmed all of these facts with multiple sources, I knew without a doubt there was no turning back for me.
- See more at:
http://www.scientology-cult.com/debb....NjbNYnFP.dpuf
So I just thought she did show a lot of integrity and courage in that incident - and, yes, she did try and help them.
I have to say, reading this, especially as a gay man, I am almost physically ill.
One day "The Hole" and the experiences there will be studied by sociologists, not unlike the "societies" that are created in many prisons and concentrations camps. The real horror for me is that in the context of the world they lived in at Int base, this probably all made sense to them.
I hope at some point some courageous filmmaker will make a movie of this - showing how people like Jenny Linsen Devocht, Angie Blankenship, and Lisa Schroer can become the kind of monsters that would perpetrate something like this. These women couldn't have started out this way. Through the brainwashing, the stress, the torture, they became capable of these psychotic acts, which has implications for all of us. Maybe one of them was completely psychotic to start with, but I doubt it. Imagine the power of a film where a woman like Jenny Devocht takes her first Scientology course, innocently extending her hand and saying, "Hi, my name is Jenny", and then later in the film we see this woman, foaming at the mouth, throwing garbage on another human being, calling her a lesbian to humiliate her, forcing confessions through violence.
It's truly heartbreaking what happens, whether you are victims or the assailants, because the bottom line is, How did we get here, as human beings? What happened that LRH and COB created a situation where this group of people turn on each other, destroy each other, as opposed to sitting there and saying, "We have to stick together to get out of here. These are not the people we were meant to be." What happened to love?
I am still horrified by the way that Debbie was sent to the Hole in the first place, the sadistic way that DM made sure she was on the phone and said, "Have they arrived" or "Are they there yet" and the men who came to get here climbed through the window. Only someone who relishes hurting people, like boys who torture animals, could come up with something like that, which such sadistic glee. The shock isn't that there are truly psychotic people in the world like COB, the shock is that so many of us give our power to people like that. Is life really so painful and scary and we need answers so badly that we will do anything to be reassured or saved?
For me, stories like this show me how damaged we all and how the human mind and psyche, while at times extraordinary, is also very frail and can be easily manipulated. Here is a group of talented people, stuck in a room, forcing two men to admit to being homosexual. And what if they are, what does that mean and why should they be punished? How can you so easily turn again someone that not long before you considered a colleague and a friend?
As an activist, I take Scientology's abuse of human beings very personally and the rest of the world should too. This isn't about religion, or about an ideology. It is about the continuation of very specific human rights violations. And while I'm sure that Debbie has her crimes, I also wonder about the tone of this original post, and the usual, "So and So is a pedophile so don't listen to them" (The implication being that if Debbie didn't have sex with children herself, she procured them for someone else, which in slander terms is almost the same thing) and which means her testimony again the church is invalid. This feels like it comes straight from the Scientology playbook to me. And I do think, given the context of where she was, it was heroic for her to challenge the so-called confessions of the men and take on the wrath of the group. That couldn't have been easy, which means that she still had a conscience.
The world has a lot to answer for for allowing Scientology to continue. I think anyone who was drawn in is a victim on some level, but in the end, we all have a responsibility, whether we were even in the church or not to say - this is wrong. On every level. It must stop.
How the fuck did we get here?