Suggesting that stories of the average Scientologist’s legendary sense of humor may have been somewhat overstated (at least at levels below OT IV, when every Scientologist completes their Comedy Auditing Trials), former Church of Scientology executive Marty Rathbun has revealed via leaked internal documents that the organization targeted South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for a lengthy period of time following 2005’s “Trapped In The Closet.” The episode—which suggested Scientology was a scam based on a fantasy concocted by a sci-fi writer, scurrilously mocking Scientology’s origin and core beliefs by writing them down and then saying them out loud—sparked an investigation into the duo by the Church’s covert Office of Special Affairs operatives, who spent well over a year looking for information that could be used against them. This, they believed, would discredit Parker and Stone in the public eye, and validate Scientology as a totally legitimate religion with nothing sinister about it at all.


According to those documents, Scientology operatives staked out the South Park production offices to compile personal information on the staff, and even concocted schemes to infiltrate the writers’ room using a Church plant who’d worked for Troma Entertainment’s Lloyd Kaufman. Through that mole, the Church established “leads” on several friends of Parker and Stone—including then-married couple John Stamos and Rebecca Romijn—whom they also targeted for “PRCs” (public records checks) and “special collections,” which Rathbun explains to the Village Voice is a Scientology code word for digging in the trash and looking for anything they can use against you, be it phone records and bank statements or even empty bottles of liquor and food containers that could help them “figure out your diet.” Unfortunately for the Church of Scientology, they were apparently thwarted in their attempts to dig through Parker and Stone’s trash. Thus, they were unable to put together the detailed description of their diets that would prove, once and for all, that the Church of Scientology is not a creepy cult built on subterfuge and intimidation tactics. Without it, the case is still somewhat open.