{"id":4571,"date":"2011-04-18T18:50:13","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T01:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reviewermag.com\/press\/?p=4571"},"modified":"2011-04-18T18:59:26","modified_gmt":"2011-04-19T01:59:26","slug":"l-ron-rhymes-with-ex-con","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reviewermag.com\/press\/2011\/04\/18\/l-ron-rhymes-with-ex-con\/","title":{"rendered":"L. Ron Rhymes with EX-CON!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/reviewermag.com\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/clonazepam.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/reviewermag.com\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/clonazepam.jpg?resize=106%2C108\" alt=\"\" width=\"106\" height=\"108\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-4575\"><\/a><strong>Scientology is a big fat, money and power-hungry machine with no regard for human life!<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Written by Kim Masters; posted by Kent Manthie with many thanks and three cheers to the courtesy of Rick Ross\u2019s Cult Education Forum, www.rickross.com<\/strong><br \/>\n   <strong> The following article was posted to the <em>Daily Beast<\/em> on 9\/27. As of today (Date?), it has been removed.  (but now, as of April 18, 2011, it&#8217;s back up on www.rickross.com -km)<\/strong><br \/>\n    The actor\u2019s public acknowledgement that his son, Jett, who died in January, was autistic has former Scientologists convinced that he will leave the church\u2014which they say has little tolerance for chronic conditions.<br \/>\n    When John Travolta took the witness stand last week and testified that his late son, Jett, was autistic, it came as a grim relief to some former Scientologists.<br \/>\n    \u201cWasn\u2019t that amazing?\u201d said a fallen-away church member after Travolta appeared in an extortion case that followed the death of his 16-year-old son last January. \u201cI thought, \u2018Good for him.\u2019 He denied it for years. It\u2019s really important that he says it.\u201d<br \/>\n    When Jett died after suffering a seizure, some former Scientologists pointed the finger at the church. Until now, his parents had said their son\u2019s illness was a syndrome caused by exposure to chemicals. Some ex-Scientologists\u2014apostates, as the church would have it\u2014believe Jett may have been deprived of appropriate treatment for years because of the church\u2019s teachings. And they think that if Travolta comes to terms with his son\u2019s diagnosis, the church eventually will lose one of its most high-profile members.<br \/>\n    \u201cMy hope for him is that he starts looking\u201d at what really happened, says Tory Christman, an outspoken Scientology critic who left after more than 30 years in the organization. At one time, Christman says she helped train Travolta in Scientology. Now she believes that if he weighs the facts, \u201che\u2019ll reach the right decision&#8230; And he\u2019s a guy who could really make a difference.\u201d<br \/>\n    Travolta\u2019s spokesman declined to comment. Tommy Davis, a spokesman for Scientology, denounced Christman and other former Scientologists who are critical of the church as \u201cliars,\u201d adding, \u201cIt\u2019s a horrific, horrific thing for these people to take the tragic death of a young boy and try to turn it on his parents\u2019 religion.\u201d<br \/>\n    Davis has said repeatedly that Scientology accepts treatment of and medication for physical illnesses. But Christman, who is epileptic, says the institution has little tolerance for chronic conditions. In Scientology, she says, such illnesses are seen as the product of \u201ccovert hostility\u201d and a failure to follow church procedures. Christman says she kept her epilepsy as much to herself as possible when she was still in the church because otherwise she would have been \u201cconsidered degraded.\u201d<br \/>\n    Christman says Scientology pushed her to stop her medication and use vitamins and supplements instead. The first time she cut back on her medications, she had a grand mal seizure in her bathroom and knocked out her front teeth. She says she resumed her medication but tried to stop again in the face of continued objections from the church\u2014and again faced disastrous results. Though the church eventually backed down, she says she doesn\u2019t think her victory was widespread or lasting. \u201cI fought \u2019em all the way,\u201d she says. But her actions only \u201cfixed it for me and a bunch of other people who were there at that time,\u201d she says.<br \/>\n    Davis denies that chronic illness creates a stigma in Scientology and that Christman was ever pressured to stop her medication. As for her description of Scientology\u2019s position on chronic illness, he says, \u201cWe could pick and choose isolated sentences, phrases from L. Ron Hubbard\u2019s books and make them sound weird, and I\u2019m not going to go there.\u201d He does acknowledge that in Scientology, \u201cWe consider that you alone are responsible for the condition that you\u2019re in.\u201d But he also insists that the church requires members to seek treatment from doctors for \u201cphysical\u201d illnesses.<br \/>\n    Former Scientologists say autism would have created issues in Scientology not only because it\u2019s chronic and not obviously \u201cphysical\u201d but because it is often assessed by psychologists and treated with the types of mood-stabilizing drugs that Scientology opposes. Jett\u2019s mother, Kelly Preston, has acted as a spokeswoman for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology offshoot dedicated to waging war on psychiatry and the use of psychiatric drugs. (The group\u2019s homepage is illustrated with a cell door labeled \u201cPsychiatry\u2026 An Industry of Death.\u201d While the group\u2019s Web site refers to autism as a \u201cphysical handicap,\u201d Scientology has battled the use of medications for conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. (Davis does not acknowledge that these conditions exist.)<br \/>\n    Travolta and his wife long said publicly that their son suffered from Kawasaki disease, a rare condition that causes arterial inflammation. \u201cWith my son I was obsessive about cleaning\u2014his space being clean, so we constantly had the carpets cleaned,\u201d Travolta told CNN in 2001. \u201cAnd I think, between him, the fumes and walking around, maybe picking up pieces or something, he got&#8230;Kawasaki syndrome.\u201d<br \/>\n    A couple of years later, Preston recounted a similar story to Montel Williams, adding, \u201cWe don\u2019t have any chemicals in the house. We\u2019re 90 percent organic, though there\u2019s some canned foods, a little bit of junk food here and there.\u201d She credited a Scientology detoxification program with improving Jett\u2019s condition.<br \/>\n    But to many observers, Jett\u2019s autism seemed obvious. And John Travolta\u2019s brother, Joey, has worked with autistic children and produced a documentary about the syndrome. Joey Travolta has never indicated that his involvement with autism was linked to his nephew\u2019s condition, but soon after Jett\u2019s death, the London Mirror reported that Joey frequently argued with his brother about Jett\u2019s diagnosis. (Joey Travolta did not respond to an inquiry from The Daily Beast.)<br \/>\n    It does not appear that Jett received the early intervention recommended for autistic children. But perhaps he was, at some point, given medication. After his death, a Travolta family lawyer told the Web site TMZ.com that Jett had taken the anti-seizure and mood-stabilizing medication Depakote for several years and had found it effective in reducing the frequency of his seizures from about once in four days to once in three weeks. But the attorney said the medication was discontinued (in consultation with neurosurgeons) because it had stopped working.<br \/>\n    I asked James McCracken, a professor of child psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, about protocols for treating seizures in autistic children. (McCracken spoke in general terms, not specifically about any individual.) He said patients don\u2019t ordinarily build up a tolerance for Depakote, so the medication doesn\u2019t usually lose effectiveness. If the medication did not work, a doctor would generally try another. \u201cTypically a neurologist would cycle through two, three, four anticonvulsants and then start working with combinations of them\u201d to control seizures, he said.<br \/>\n    Former Scientologist Claire Headley was raised in Scientology and worked in its internal affairs office from the time she was 16 until she left the organization five years ago. (She is now suing for labor law violations, alleging that she was paid $46 a week.) In her experience, she says, the church opposed the use of any medication considered to be a psychiatric drug. She says that as far as she knows, the only approved approaches to Jett\u2019s issues were \u201cassists and objective processing.\u201d Objective processing, according to Headley, involves trying to put individuals \u201cin touch with their environment\u2014like, \u2018Look at that wall. Thank you. Turn around. Thank you. Put your hands against mine.\u2019 \u201d<br \/>\n    Assists are meant \u201cto get somebody in communication with their body,\u201d she says. \u201cLike a touch assist\u2014\u2018Feel my finger. Feel my finger\u2019\u2014all over a person\u2019s body.\u201d That is similar to the process Travolta himself performed on director Randal Kleiser when they were working on the 1978 film Grease. After Kleiser cut his foot and developed a fever, \u201cJohn came to my trailer to do a healing,\u201d he told Entertainment Weekly. \u201cHe took his finger and pushed it into my arm and said, \u2018Do you feel my finger? \u2019 and I said \u2018Yes,\u2019 and then he\u2019d move it an inch and say, \u2018Do you feel my finger? \u2019 He did this for about an hour. Here was the star of the movie helping me, so I didn\u2019t criticize. The next day, though, my fever was gone.\u201d<br \/>\n    Clearly, Travolta is devastated that he could not save the son to whom he was, by all accounts, devoted. But Tory Christman says she believes that he has an opportunity to save others. \u201cI feel really bad for him,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I just don\u2019t want him to be used by the church. It\u2019s horrible he lost his son but\u2014change something. He\u2019s a guy who could really make a difference.\u201d<br \/>\n    But Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis calls Christman\u2019s comments \u201cdisgusting,\u201d adding, \u201cThis religion is utterly and completely about helping. It\u2019s just insane to think that Scientology would be a factor in somebody not getting all the help they need.\u201d<br \/>\n<strong>-Courtesy of www.rickross.com and Kim Masters; -KM<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientology is a big fat, money and power-hungry machine with no regard for human life! Written by Kim Masters; posted by Kent Manthie with many thanks and three cheers to the courtesy of Rick Ross\u2019s Cult Education Forum, www.rickross.com The following article was posted to the Daily Beast on 9\/27. As of today (Date?), it has been removed. (but now, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,606],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-lifestytle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10442,"url":"https:\/\/reviewermag.com\/press\/2014\/08\/04\/cd-review-grit-by-stone-horse\/","url_meta":{"origin":4571,"position":0},"title":"cd review: GRIT by Stone Horse","author":"Reviewer Rob","date":"August 4, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"GRIT by Stone Horse10 tracks, stonehorse.netby Reviewer Rob the rock snob The core of this La Jolla-based working local bar rock band is a two-piece consisting of singer Danielle Spade and guitarist Carlos Rodriguez. 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