Though it made its HBO premiere nearly two weeks ago, people are still talking about Going Clear, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney's enlightening (and frightening) expose on the Church of Scientology and its members. Which says a lot about the public's fascination with L. Ron Hubbard's widely known but little understood philosophy. And the movie has also put the Church itself on the defensive (or into attack mode, depending on your perspective). It's a position that Mark "Marty" Rathbun understands all too well.

As a former senior executive within the Church, Rathbun—who appears as one of Gibney's talking heads in Going Clear—has spent the past decade attempting to reconcile the 27 years he spent in the Church of Scientology (he joined in 1977), including time at the top of its ranks. In addition to a popular blog, Rathbun has connected with and counseled other former Church members, whom he has also encouraged to speak out. Which has made him Scientology's public enemy number one. Which suits Rathbun just fine, as he explained in his recent interview with Esquire.

What was it that most appealed to you about the concept of Scientology when you became involved?

Well, I got involved back in the 1970s in something that was really their communication course. It was really sort of a practical thing that really increased your focus and ability to comfortably communicate. So that's what appealed.

You left the Church in 2004. In the movie, we see a lot about the idea of being shut out or disconnected from the Church. But when one decides to leave of his or her own accord, is there a formal way of doing that?

Yes, but it all sort of depends. It is really Byzantine and complicated, depending on your status and whether you are staff or some level of staff or whether you are not staff. But the simplicity is this: If you don't tow the line, if you are critical, if you express criticism to any degree and you persist with it, you are labeled a "suppressive person." And when you are a suppressive person all other Scientologists, by longstanding policy, must disconnect from you in every way, shape, matter, or form, including any communication or any association whatsoever.

For you personally what was the hardest part about leaving?

Well, the hardest part was leaving my wife. I spent the last 10 months attempting to sort of reconcile the fact that I had to go because of the extremity of abuse that was going on. She was a second-generation Scientologist and she chose to stay.

Following your departure you began working with other former Scientologists in what you've described as a sort of "rehabilitation program." Are there certain teachings or lessons learned during your time with the Church that you still you hold on to today?

Well, you know, in actual fact not. I have spent the last six years counseling former members and helping them reintegrate, and I've done a tremendous amount of research deconstructing Scientology. It's interesting that you ask this right now because I just did an interview last week with Larry Flick on Morning Jolt on Sirius XM where I kind of spelled this out. I attempted to do what you are saying, I attempted to retain some of my more important learnings, but as I deconstructed the subject I learned that they weren't really original. I just recently kind of recognized completely that I have come full circle to the point where I don't attribute [those ideas] to Scientology anymore. Because I found the origins of them, the source of it.

Between yourself and other former members, do you see a common thread in terms of why people make that final decision to leave the Church, or the feelings that they experience after leaving?

Scientology is such an effective bubble and such an effective defense mechanism set up in everybody's minds that I found that is really not effective. I think really everybody I have dealt with, and I have dealt with hundreds of people since I left, would say they left because the abuses that they saw or participated in—the effect of that outweighed the benefits. That's really the bottom line in the final analysis. In terms of the common experience, there is one... and it's that there is so much put into creating this bubble with this whole disconnect policy and the suppressive persons and all that, that by design you are completely alone. When you go out, nobody shares your experience. In the last five or six years, my atonement has sort of been to contribute a lot to making it safe for people to talk, and connecting people together so they can share their experience. That's the first step I think of helping them decompress and reintegrate.

The gist of what we, the general public, know or hear about Scientology comes from when some well-known member, like Paul Haggis or Leah Remini, leaves the Church and speaks out about it. Then it becomes a big news story. But for the most part, do people who leave the Church remain fairly silent on the topic?

Yes. They walk away quietly, in silent desperation. Paul Haggis was in communication with me for many months before he ever released his letter on my blog. That was a year before he spoke to [Going Clear author] Larry Wright. It's a process. It's a very intimate, one-on-one type of process. Because nobody understands what you are talking about. Jason Beghe really said it all in just a couple of sentences in the film when he said that you adopt this matrix of thought that's not your own. Part of that is that you are adopting a nomenclature... But its essential ingredients are not original. They only seem that way because there is a whole nomenclature, which is part and parcel with that whole matrix.

"It's a really sophisticated form of psychological warfare."

Well the public perception is largely that it's a form of brainwashing. Is that something you would agree with, or is it more complicated than that?

I think that is one of those explosive terms. And I guess the one that I use is maybe just as explosive, but it's more technical and it really is "mind control." Anything that is a super-closed kind of system of improvement, mentally, to some degree has elements of that. I think Scientology is pretty extreme on it, with creating this whole bubble.

The Church of Scientology was founded more than 60 years ago, which is a long span of time to cover in a two-hour documentary. Is there one part of the story, or part of the experience of being a member, that wasn't covered in the film that you wish had been? Or wish had been covered in more depth?

Not really. I mean, you know I have done almost 1,300 blog posts. I have written three books. I have two more in progress, and then it will be totally out of my system. [Laughs.] Yet I'm in the film for maybe a grand total of three to five minutes. This is an outsider's take [and] I just think he did a masterful job. In the end, I kind of go against the grain on people saying, "You know it is going to influence current members and all of this stuff is going to influence the Church." I don't agree with that. What it's going to do is let people on the outside who might have an interest in Scientology know what the consequences are. Because he really, in an emotional but very factual and accurate way, chronicles what the objective end product is. You are dealing with a subject that is so subjective, so you have to look at the objective result.

If you were still a member of the Church, would you even watch something like this?

As a high-ranking person, yes. Because I would have to deal with the fallout. But anybody who is not responsible for that wouldn't watch it.

In the film, Jason Beghe describes you as "the Michael Jordan" of auditing, which is probably one of the most fascinating parts of Scientology to an outsider. Both from the perspective of the auditor and the person being audited, how do you describe or explain that process?

I just discussed this with Tony Ortega's The Underground Bunker, which is interesting just as a point of reference. Because he also brought up the Michael Jordan thing. I said, "Well here is my recognition after all of these years!" Because I continued to counsel when I was outside the Church, I really looked at what sort of set me apart or put me in this place where people would say, "Hey, he's really good." And I recognized that in all this complicated, sophisticated stuff that goes with it, the only thing that set me apart was my ability to instill confidence in somebody. And I came to the final recognition, having studied a lot of Hubbard's influences, that he never invented this. This stuff was well in practice long before he ever got the idea of being a guru... So to the extent that you can inspire somebody and inspire confidence, you are going to do them good. And you call it Scientology or you can call it Rastafaria. Whatever you call it, it's the same process.

By speaking out so often and so publicly, you've become a sort of target for the Church. Do you ever have any regrets about doing it?

Well I am kind of more than "sort of a target." For the past five years I have been the target.

True.

One of the things that I set out to achieve from the beginning when I did speak out, and I sort of promoted it, is that everybody remaining below the radar and posting on boards with anonymous names and all of this stuff has no impact on Scientology. All it does is free up all of their resources to take out the people who do talk out. I promote people to stand up and be counted, and hundreds did literally. What I predicted came to pass, and after a certain amount of people stood up, they didn't have the resources to put fingers in all those holes in the dike. What they did instead, pretty clearly, was invested all of their resources in very publicly taking out the guy who told everybody not to be afraid. In terms of regret, the answer is no. But I will say that I think I have achieved what I set out to achieve, and I had more than a year ago even when I did the interview [for Going Clear]. Which might give you some context for my demeanor and my answers when you see in the film. I am so done with this stuff I can't tell you, but they won't let me be done. [Laughs.] It's frustrating, but I don't find it regretful because I felt it was something I had to do.

Do you ever have any direct contact with Church members or is it always via another outlet?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I have got two YouTube videos in the past four months of being ambushed by these people, one at LAX and one at a film studio in Los Angeles, one of which went viral. Yeah. They wait and lurk, and they are probably watching me right this moment as we speak. I won't hear anything then all of the sudden, a few months later, I will be walking through security and four people jump me. They'll get in my face with cameras and start screaming insults at me. It's a really sophisticated form of psychological warfare.

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