But the Church is losing control of its public image—in large part because the flow of information in the digital age is irrepressible. “It’s the Internet that has changed everything,” says Tony Ortega, the former editor of The Village Voice and founder of a website, The Underground Bunker, that’s dedicated to criticizing Scientology.

For example, in 2013, a Scientology spokesperson told the BBC that 27,000 people had attended its services in northeast England during the past decade. But those curious about the true number of members in the region can easily find the results of a 2011 census, which found only 2,418 self-identified Scientologists in England and Wales. (In contrast, 176,632 respondents identified as Jedi Knights.) The same census also found that in Northumbria, the number of Scientologists was 62.

Worldwide, too, the group’s membership claims appear to be dramatically inflated. The Church’s official media center states that Scientology has “more than 11,000 Churches, Missions, and affiliated groups across 167 nations." Karin Pouw, the group's spokesperson, says there are millions of Scientologists worldwide and that the Church has grown more in the past 10 years than in the previous 50 years combined.

But according to the new documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, directed by Alex Gibney and based on the Pulitzer-winning journalist Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name, the Church has fewer than 50,000 members. The movie, which airs on HBO March 29 and 30, is a portrait of an institution in flux, bewildered by the ubiquity of information.

“The genie’s out of the bottle,” Gibney says. “They can’t keep information bottled up, and their attempts to do so show them in the worst possible light. It’s like that moment in The Wizard of Oz where Toto pulls back the curtain and you see the wizened old man say, ‘Pay no attention!’ It’s too late. The curtain’s been pulled back."

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Journalists have been reporting on the Church's practices for decades, from The St. Petersburg Times' Pulitzer-winning report in 1980 to Janet Reitman's 2006 feature for Rolling Stone, “Inside Scientology.” Historically, Scientology's default crisis-management mode has involved a combination of aggressive legal action and powerful counter-narrative. In 1991, when Time published a cover story titled “Scientology: The Cult of Greed,” the Church critiqued the story in a 48-page advertising supplement in USA Today. At the same time, it sued the magazine for $416 million. By the time the suit was dismissed in 1996, Time Warner had spent an estimated $3.7 million on legal fees.

In the early days of the Internet, the organization made efforts to restrict online information about its activities and core tenets. During the mid-1990s, it went after users for posting unauthorized information on newsgroups, tracking them down through their Internet service providers and even sending police to seize their hard drives. “They had a guy prosecuted for simply joking on the Internet about sending a ‘Tom Cruise missile’ to the secret headquarters compound,” Ortega says.