Marty Rathbun is a former Scientologist who currently tours the media as an "expert" on scientology. But there is a darker side to him, broadly known only to those who worked with him in the past. And certainly not known or ignored by those journalists that bank on him for a fast tabloid shot. Freedom Magazine has told the full story and one of their articles is repeated here.
The Chronicles of Betrayal
But what he did not tell S.P. Times reporters Tom Tobin and Joe Childs was, in his own words, “a web of lies so complex it would take pages to recount.”
Included in the chronicle:
- How Marty Rathbun successfully torpedoed a 1986 settlement on a harassment suit, thereby extending the case 20 years and racking up legal expenditures to upwards of $20 million.
- How his actions would have prevented Church recognition by the Internal Revenue Service. And how he then deserted (blew), sneaking away in a rented car in 1993, even as parishioners were celebrating their historic IRS victory.
- How he suborned perjury, destroyed evidence and otherwise obstructed justice in a case, hiding his involvement and costing the Church tens of millions.
- How he admitted to his “proven proclivity for creating some of the greatest catastrophes in Church history when allowed to have some leash.”
- And how after concluding, “I have not confronted the magnitude of the harm visited upon Scientology and thus mankind through my losing ways,” he again snuck away—this time on the Yamaha motorcycle cited in his story to the S.P. Times.
12 noon, Tuesday, February 3, 2004:
In what he himself describes as a “surrealistic scene,” Rathbun tells of deserting and heading for the desert, where he cruises to a stop and approaches the father of a nine-year-old boy.
“I know this doesn’t make any sense,” he tells the father, “but this is my bike and I don’t need it no more. And your kid loves it, so take the bike.”
As it certainly did not make sense, police were soon contacting the Church address where the bike was registered to find out if the bike had been stolen.
For, after all, what right-minded individual would give a 550 cc motorcycle to a kid who could hardly see over the handlebars much less mount the thing.
Regardless, Rathbun then rents a nondescript vehicle and heads north along the California coast with a bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila on the passenger seat. The next morning, he awakens amidst the wreckage, telephones his wife in tears, and makes his way to the Scientology retreat in Clearwater, Florida.
There, he is provided a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment shared with a pet chihuahua. He is additionally provided with upwards of $85,000 in medical care to treat a shopping list of outstanding complaints, including:
- All varicose veins and small calcium deposits are removed, as are gallstones.
- A colonoscopy is prescribed with secondary laser surgery to remove polyps.
- While an MRI reveals he suffered no serious structural damage when he demolished his rented vehicle, a chiropractor is nonetheless enlisted for evening spinal adjustments.
- He is further provided access to a private exercise facility, placed on a medically supervised nutritional regime, and given part-time vocational training in a Church carpentry mill (a job he expressly requested).
Following his 10-month sabbatical, on Sunday, December 12, 2004, he ended his career in the Sea Organization, which he described to the S.P. Times :
“It was the last day of the football season and all I wanted to do was watch a football game. So on a Sunday, I put an extra change of underwear in my carry bag [and] just kept walking. Found a hole in the wall bar, got drunk with some guy off the street, hung out till four o’clock in the morning, ate a pizza in the park with the guy, then got on a bus for Orlando....
And that was the end of it.”
So much for his story that he left in protest of “abuses” endured...
While as for what other tales Rathbun would tell after munching pizza in a park, he was soon to inform Church officials of a “five-year plan” to inaugurate a grassroots campaign for L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology. It was by no means an impossible dream and such programs are already extant in disadvantaged neighborhoods all over Tampa Bay. But by the end of those five years, Rathbun was hardly rolling out a literacy program. On the contrary, he was sinking into oblivion.
Out of the Park and Into the Pit
Rathbun now lives, by his own description, in a stilt house in Texas with his girlfriend and dog. He claims to be a writer but according to one of those he’s been soliciting for employment, he in fact pushes a broom to make ends meet.
Appearing on Rathbun’s web page is a photograph of himself arm in arm with one Jason Beghe who is a more often than not unemployed actor who is best known for casting himself in the role of a vocal and disturbed ex-Scientologist. He is known across the Internet fringe as a poster-child for Anonymous cyber-terrorists who have repeatedly targeted Churches of Scientology.
Beghe is further known to have orchestrated hate marches, most notably at Churches of Scientology in New York and San Francisco. He is joined at the latter by long-time anti-religious litigant and hatemonger Larry Wollersheim. Ironically enough, it was none other than Rathbun who was responsible for defending the Church from Wollersheim. This was one of his first major legal subversions when he torpedoed an early settlement so he could fight instead. Beghe is additionally known as a paid mouthpiece for Germany’s foremost anti-religionist, Ursula Caberta, and his portrait now hangs in the Los Angeles County Criminal Justice Division for aggravated assault of a process server—an assault committed while the Times was preparing this story.
Hence, the retort to Tom Tobin when attempting to characterize Rathbun as a practicing Scientologist:
“So that’s who Rathbun is associating with. He’s the very antithesis of a Scientologist and a self-appointed enemy.”
Meanwhile, his “client” and “webmaster” Steve Hall claims he created the universe in league with Jesus Christ and Gautama Siddhartha Buddha.
“So what’s your theory of the case? That these people have overactive imaginations and just invented all these things out of whole cloth?”
—Tom Tobin
Continued on Freedommag.org
