Fifteen years later, he has written a book about his time there. Some of the details are shocking, but what Reeder, 67, really hopes is that A Billion Years: My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology will act as a rescue operation for his two grown children who remain in church. Before Scientology took up all his time and energy, Reeder enjoyed reading Wilbur Smith novels, and his own book begins as an adventure story. In 2007, he walked out of the church office in central London and walked through a door. He was 52. He was carrying £200 in cash, a credit card and his passport. As a church official he had hunted down people who tried to leave, so he knew what to expect. “I had to get out of sight, remove the batteries from my phones, use only cash and stay on the go,” he says. When he was sure he wasn’t being followed, he took the tube to the National Portrait Gallery, where he sat on the grass outside and let his heart rate slow to its normal rate. “I went ok, now what? What to do? For the first time that I could remember, I was accountable to no one.” “The Aristocracy of Scientology” … Tom Cruise gave Reeder birthday presents. Photo: Paul White/AP Reeder, who grew up in Adelaide, Australia, with his brother and sister, was five years old when a neighbor introduced his parents to Scientology. During his high school years, the family moved to England for months at a time so they could study at Hubbard’s base in Sussex. They visited the National Portrait Gallery together, but that’s not why Reeder is drawn there. “It’s a place I’d mostly been to on my own,” he says. He wandered through the galleries and when he finally came out, he knew what to do. He bought cheap clothes, left his suit and found a B&B near Victoria station. Two days later, he flew back to Florida and contacted other ex-Scientologists who helped him slowly start his new life. Reeder says he only planned his escape for three days before he left. But it must have taken more than a few days to undo decades of conviction. Eventually, he was immersed enough to be convinced of an origin story that involves Xenu, the head of the Galactic Confederation, sending people to Earth, sticking them in volcanoes, and dropping bombs on them. Reeder had lived on church grounds, eaten meals in the military-style canteen and worked at least 14 hours a day, seven days a week for $50 a week. How did he come to recognize transgressive thoughts, given that he had been trained to understand them as signs of a “reactive mind,” as something to be eradicated? He says it was in the years after David Miscavige, the current leader, became head of Scientology in 1987, after Hubbard’s death, that things began to happen to “shake my certainty.” In the book, Rinder writes that he was physically assaulted by Miscavige. Other punishments for perceived “uncontrollable bad intentions” or alleged failures at work ranged from cleaning a sewage holding pit to wearing a paper plate mask and being taunted by a ventriloquist’s doll built in his own image. Other times, employees were forced to jump clothed into a pool and “commit our sins in the deep,” says Rinder. He says the worst by far was the year or more Reeder spent in a building known as “the Hole” at the church’s international base near Hemet, California. He was initially sent there to explore his subversive intentions, although at the time he had none, and then, when as director of the Office of Special Affairs, he failed to prevent the BBC’s Panorama program from broadcasting a program about Scientology. . Here he lived under 24-hour guard, in a sort of prison camp for fallen Scientology officials, with no access to the outside world and no explanation of what crime had earned him the placement. He suffered violence and inflicted it on others. “It was part of the culture. Anyone who did not was subject to discipline.” It was his removal from the Hole for a mission to London that gave him the opportunity to escape. If Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard were still alive today, I’d probably still be there Remarkably, even after this, Reeder continued his faith, identifying as a Scientologist while working as a car salesman, his first job abroad. Except he wanted Miscavige gone. So what if Hubbard were still alive today? “I’d probably still be there,” he says. He still sounds excited when he recalls being appointed Hubbard’s special “watch messenger” in 1978, where orders ranged from telling the cook that Hubbard wanted chicken for dinner to smelling the laundry, which had to be washed seven times and aired out to ensure it was odorless. “I mean, there’s a very limited number of people on this Earth who have ever done that,” he says of the position. The funny thing is, now that he’s out and his faith has lost its power, Rider still doesn’t seem very free. He thinks he is being watched, a subject of interest to private investigators. And although he says he doesn’t care, he keeps “a small bin” indoors in case his waste is looted. Whistleblower activities account for about 60% of Reeder’s working life now (the remaining 40% is spent installing audio-visual equipment at the business of another ex-Sea Org member who has also written a book about Scientology). Reeder has contributed to countless documentaries about Scientology, including Leah Remini’s Scientology and Aftermath. She also hosts a podcast with her. He has a post-Scientology blog. His closest friends are ex-Scientologists, as is his second wife, Christy Kolbran. In a sense, he is a professional ex-Scientologist. “What a job title is that!” he exclaims. Reeder with his second wife, Christy Kolbran. Photo: Zuma Press Inc/Alamy Doesn’t he want to get rid of Scientology altogether? “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to part with this job. People contact me every day asking for help.” Besides, he says, he wants to give his two older children the chance to “think for themselves.” When he was 17 or 18, Reeder joined the Sea Org, the famous order in Scientology whose members take on church management roles. He signed the organization’s standard “billion-year contract,” designed to cover his entire future (since Scientologists believe in life after life; Hubbard told him he’d probably run planets before). His ex-wife Kathy signed the same. In time, so did their children, Taryn and Benjamin. It’s fair to say that this arrangement instilled in Rinder a skewed idea of parenting. He became a father in his 20s, but rarely saw his children. Back then, Reeder says, babies were delivered a few days after birth to Sea Org nurseries, where they were cared for seven days a week, from morning to midnight. “I’m not saying I was a good parent,” he says. “I say the exact opposite. I was a Sea Org parent.” How old is she now? “It’s hard for me to remember,” Reeder says. “Taryn was born in 1978 and now it’s… 2022… So she’s 44. And Benjamin was born in nineteen eighty… like two, or three?” The lack of memory is “kind of annoying. But, you know,” he says, “he’s not exactly in my life anymore.” After he ran away, he wrote to Cathy to ask her and the kids to accompany him abroad, and she replied, “Fuck you.” In Scientology, when a family is divided into believers and non-believers, disconnection is a common and painful experience. Taryn, Benjamin and Cathy released videos claiming that Rinder abandoned the family when he left Scientology. His older children published an open letter disowning him – which probably undermines Reeder’s stated goal in writing to reach out to his children. “A book for an audience of two,” he calls it. I hold out hope that the bubble my children live in may eventually burst Will they have even seen it? “It would be very difficult. I’m sure they were told, “It’s full of lies, blah blah.” He did not send them a copy. “It would be a waste of two books.” They would never have reached their recipients, he says. Now that he and Christy, whom he married in 2013, have a 10-year-old son, Jack, Reeder has experienced a new kind of fatherhood. “I get up every morning and make him breakfast, pack his lunch and drive him to school… We go out to eat, go to the park, ride bikes… We talk about all kinds of things,” she says. . As a member of the Sea Org, he had no access to a loving family life. His first wife is barely mentioned in the book. It seems surprising that they produced children, so rarely do their paths seem to cross. Similarly, Reeder’s parents are barely controlled. Tragically, Reeder and Kathy lost a third baby to sudden infant death syndrome – or in the words of Miscavige’s wife, who broke the news, the baby “fell out of her body.” According to the church’s beliefs, Reeder responded by sitting with a controller (a Scientologist charged with controlling another’s emotions) “to work through the loss.” The process may have worked a little too well because the book outlines the death of his baby in a page and a half. Although…
