Going Clear, Part 19 – IRS, Wright and Harry Smith (NBC) trickery and bias

Going Clear, Part 19 – IRS, Wright and Harry Smith (NBC) trickery and bias

The only media that I participated in or was asked to participate in, was when the book came out in January 2013. Larry Wright asked me if I would be willing to go to New York to do a segment of some NBC show, Rock Center I think it might have been. You know, he said, you’re a central person in this whole thing. And so, would you do that, talk about the book? And I said sure. And I don’t even know if I read the book by that point, I am not sure, maybe, maybe not. But in either event, I did and I flew to New York and I spent an entire half a day with Harry Smith in this elaborate set-up in some, it was down the street, it was like—it was in the Waldorf Astoria. It was like this old historic room, library type of thing and we were there for the entire morning and into the afternoon. And the entire time we were in there, Harry Smith was doing what Larry Wright had done with me a year earlier, or two years earlier, was to try to get this generalized statement that Scientology’s tax exemption was fraudulently or illegitimately obtained and he tried angle after angle and I’m like, to me it was like Larry Wright redux.

Larry Wright had gone through the same thing with me and I went through chapter and verse and detail about no, you don’t get it. Yeah, there was some hard ball played but you don’t get it. When the IRS is coming after you, you’ve got to play hardball back or you meet your demise. You’re getting all caught up in these tactics and the bottom line is and the thing that they just want to write out of history is that two years, all the hardball tactics did was get us to the table, okay? And at that point, they held the cards and they held everything and every anti-Scientology voice, every person who had been there for 20 years and had this deep-seated institutional bias, everyone of them was fully heard and we had to answer to every one of them. Okay? And for two years we went through – and I had to explain this all over to Harry Smith. And Harry Smith is looking at me like, he’s pissed. It’s like he can’t believe that there is all this information coming out and all he wants is to get in the cut and print on yeah the whole thing was a sham or the whole thing was, you know. And so, it just went on for three hours, and it did. It got to the point where it, as it had sort of with Wright a year and a half earlier of this sort of testiness and disappointment.

But, that was it. And we finally finished. We got out of there. I couldn’t wait to get out and get back home. So, unsurprisingly, I guess—two weeks later the show plays and I’m not in it. So, clearly, I mean very clearly, that was the intent of Larry Wright having me go there in the first place. It was what Harry Smith was briefed on. It was what he was to get and they didn’t get it, so they just cut it out. You know, just cut it.