Why “Personal Harm” Will Never Take Down David Miscavige
I want to be very clear about something before I go any further.
I am not dismissing personal harm.
I am not minimizing abuse.
And I am certainly not attacking people who were hurt.
I was hurt too.
What I am doing is pointing out a hard truth that a lot of people do not want to hear, because it hurts in a different way.
Personal harm, no matter how real or how horrific, has never been enough to threaten David Miscavige.
And it is not because the harm was minimal or exaggerated.
It is because the system is built to absorb it.
The fundamental mistake
For decades, people have tried to confront David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology by telling the truth about what happened to them.
They were abused.
They were coerced.
They were isolated.
They were destroyed.
All of that is real.
And all of it has failed to produce accountability.
Not because the stories were weak, but because the structure is designed to neutralize them.
Scientology is shielded by religious recognition. That shield is not symbolic. It is functional.
It triggers First Amendment protections.
It invokes the ministerial exception.
It triggers ecclesiastical abstention.
It forces disputes into internal arbitration disguised as religious doctrine.
Courts instinctively step back.
Regulators hesitate.
Prosecutors avoid entanglement.
As long as the fight is framed as individual harm versus a religion, the system wins.
Every time.
Why individual stories do not threaten the structure
Personal narratives are emotionally valid. They are also structurally powerless when presented in isolation.
And that is not accidental.
They are deliberately atomized.
Each case is treated as an outlier.
Abuse is reframed as internal religious conflict.
Settlements and NDAs bury patterns.
Responsibility never reaches the top.
Meanwhile, David Miscavige remains surgically insulated.
He holds no meaningful corporate title that clearly implies control.
He hides behind a maze of interlocking entities.
RTC. CSI. CST. IAS.
Boards that do not function.
Executives who do not govern.
Plausible deniability by design.
This is architecture, not coincidence.
That is why the “oh woe is me” approach, no matter how justified, never forces courts, regulators, or investigators to look behind the curtain.
It never threatens the system that protects him.
The only strategy that creates real exposure
If someone actually wanted to make an impact, real impact, the target would not be abuse.
The target would be structure.
Not:
“David Miscavige hurt me.”
But:
David Miscavige built and operates a fraudulent corporate system falsely presented as a religion, for his exclusive benefit.
That framing changes everything.
Where the religious shield begins to fail
The moment you establish any one of the following, the protections people think are impenetrable begin to crack.
The corporate structure is a sham.
No functioning boards.
Undated resignations.
Officers without fiduciary authority.
Entities that exist on paper only.
Scientology does not operate as a church.
No meaningful congregation.
No proportional charitable output.
Massive real estate holdings with minimal religious use.
Revenue streams untethered from religious practice.
Financial benefit flows upward to one man.
Control of intellectual property.
Royalty extraction.
Personal use of church resources.
A retaliation apparatus used for personal protection.
The system exists to protect royalties, not faith.
Originally Hubbard’s.
Now Miscavige’s.
At that point, the issue is no longer belief or doctrine.
It becomes fraud.
Conspiracy.
False representation.
Tax abuse.
Continuing criminal enterprise.
None of those are constitutionally protected activities.
Why this terrifies Miscavige
This approach does what decades of lawsuits, exposés, and personal testimony could not.
It bypasses theology entirely.
It centers control, money, and governance.
It targets the man, not the belief.
It turns discovery into an existential threat.
It forces testimony under oath.
Most importantly, it reframes Scientology not as a religion with abuses, but as a business falsely claiming to be a religion.
That is the difference between noise and leverage.
The bottom line
You do not take down Scientology by attacking Scientology.
You expose that:
There is no church.
There is no independent governance.
There is no public benefit.
There is one beneficiary.
And that the entire structure exists to shield that beneficiary from accountability.
Once that is established, the First Amendment stops being a shield and starts being irrelevant.
That is not an emotional argument.
That is a prosecutable one.
I’m sure this is obvious to many of you, but from where I stand, one of the primary forces keeping people in is the disconnection policy. Two of my children work for or operate companies that are owned by or staffed largely with Scientologists. If they were to leave the church, they would likely lose their jobs.
They may not even be actively involved in Scientology anymore, but it functions as the glue holding their professional and social worlds together. So they maintain appearances, whether or not they still believe—or ever truly believed—that the technology works.
And for those who own businesses staffed by Scientologists, church policies can also serve as a means of maintaining control over employees.
Sure. The point of exposing Scientology through personal stories is to use the media to expose its abusive nature, which is not obvious at the beginning. Perhaps some people have thought that enough exposure would be enough to somehow get someone in authority to take action and prosecute Scientology for its crimes or go after Miscavige for innurement or something like that. But none of those stories have accomplished that. What they have accomplished is word of mouth that Scientology is not just quirky or weird, but is actually dangerous and even deadly when it comes to things like Narconon. And that is one of the main reasons why people do not go into a Church of Scientology for help anymore. There's zero question about the effectiveness of the PR war against Scientology. But it is true that the product of that was never going to be Scientology dismantled or deconstructed legally. However, I don't see that following this path of somehow exposing Scientology's corporate malfeasance or lack of public benefit is going to do much either. I mean, look around in the world today. No one cares. The US government and the IRS literally could not care less about an abusive pipsqueak cult like Scientology and are not going to lift a finger to take any action against it no matter what legal tactics or exposure tactics are used. We are in an environment where the abusive predatory elements of our society are having their Golden Age. I think we should be very realistic in the fact that taking Scientology apart from the outside is simply not something that anyone is going to accomplish anytime soon. There are ways that David Miscavige could accomplish it from the inside, and there are even ways that people at the highest levels of Scientology could take it apart. What we do on the outside as ex-members is we educate and inform the public so that they don't walk in the front door of the churches in the first place. And that is by far the most effective thing that has been done to fight Scientology all of these years going all the way back to the beginning. My two cents. I'd love to see that I'm wrong, but I don't think that I am.