Going Clear Movie, Part 5 - Inventions (Joel Sappel, LA Times)

So, at 52:20 they have this Kim Masters, whom I don’t know from Adam, says that a guy from the LA Times, his dog was poisoned while working on a story on Scientology. Right? And I wouldn’t even know what she’s talking about except, that a year earlier, I had been visited by a reporter from the LA Times, no longer for the LA Times, but was working for the LA Times, named Joel Sappell. And I didn’t even know this, but Joel Sappell was telling me, in 2012, I guess, that in 1990, allegedly, or 89, his dog was poisoned while he was working on a Scientology story.

And my, you know, I spent an hour with this guy. You know, as a personal favor, really, you know, a person to person, because I was blown away that this guy for 20 years would be fixated on this false idea. Because obviously, if anybody poisoned his dog, it would have been at my direction or I would have known about it, right? But Scientology doesn’t poison dogs. Been accused of it many times. Never done it. Never even done anything like it. Never done anything to anybody critical of Scientology physical, ever, even in the darkest hours of the Guardian’s Office, before our time. Right?

And so I’m trying to give this guy, ok, I spent an hour with Joel Sappell, the reporter she’s making reference to, to his face, and it really was, I got to tell you, I mean, it was really sincere, I was, because it didn’t mean anything to me. I’m sort of in opposition with the Church at the time, so I’m not, I’m not trying to defend the Church, I’m trying to, trying to give this guy a reality check. Because it’s blowing my mind what it must be like him, him either perpetuating that lie for 20 years, or actually believing that, being so, being so tainted by the type of propaganda that Gibney and Wright have produced.

But that’s a very interesting, instructive moment right there. Because if you think about that, because Joel Sappell, if he actually really did believe that and hung onto it for 20 years, I’m just telling you, it just didn’t happen. OK? If something happened to his dog, it had nothing to do with Scientology. Alright? And that, and that I was shocked to learn 20 years after the fact, it’s not like something that just happened in this big waving network. I was on that story, from the day we heard it was happening, and they worked on it for years. I know exactly what happened. I know exactly, everything that happened, investigation-wise, PR-wise, etc., from the day the situation arose.

It arose two years earlier. He started on it in 87, I think and they never came out with it until 89 or 90. Nothing like that ever happened, right? And so, it’s instructive for this reason. Because if Joel Sappell truly believed that, and hung onto that all that time, that means he was poisoned by some kind of propaganda that he had gotten as far back as the 80s when it happened, right? OK. I’m telling you, this film, is far more misleading, vicious and downright scary, creating a downright scary impression, than anything that had been produced up to the time that Joel Sappell got the false idea, and paranoid, false idea, that somebody’d messed with his dog.