Fractured Families and Broken Lives in the Church of Scientology

(This is the second of a three-part series on the Church of Scientology. Read the first part here.)

We can learn much about life in a new religious movement through the eyes of the children — of those born into a cult and those spawned by its founder. And that’s where we’ll go in the next two installments of “Messiahs I Have Known.”

When it came to marriage and family life, the late L. Ron Hubbard did not practice what he preached.

According to its official teachings, the Church of Scientology “regards the family as the building block of any society and marriage as an essential component of a stable family life.”

According to his unofficial biographers, Hubbard, who lived from 1911 to 1986, had at least seven children by three different wives, marrying his second wife before his divorce from his first was finalized.

His first son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., was born May 7, 1934, in Southern California to Hubbard’s first wife, Margaret “Polly” Grubb. Their second child, Katherine May Hubbard, was born Jan. 15, 1936.

Hubbard Jr., who later changed his name to Ronald DeWolf, helped build his father’s Scientology empire in the 1950s but later denounced his dad as a “fraud.”

“Scientology is a power- and money- and intelligence-gathering game,” he said in a 1983 interview.

DeWolf died in 1991.

Hubbard’s second wife, Sara Northrup Hubbard, gave birth to Hubbard’s third child, Alexis Valerie Hubbard, on March 8, 1950.

A few months later, Hubbard would unveil Dianetics, his “new science of the mind,” in the May 1950 issue of the magazine “Astounding Science Fiction.” His longer treatise, “Dianetics - The Modern Science of Mental Health,” would be published later that year and become a national craze, laying the groundwork for the tax-exempt Church of Scientology.

In divorce papers filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1951, Sara Hubbard said the founder of Scientology did not mention that he was already married - and had two children - when they exchanged their vows on Aug. 10, 1946.

Hubbard did not secure a divorce from his first wife until Dec. 24, 1947.

In her divorce papers, Sara Hubbard accused the self-help guru of “systematic torture, beatings, strangulations and scientific torture experiments.” She also accused Hubbard of kidnapping Alexis, a story that made headlines in Los Angeles in 1951.

Alexis, now 76, has kept out of the public eye, perhaps because of a reported financial settlement with the church following Hubbard’s death in 1986. My research assistant, Claude, came up with this paragraph, based mostly on material unearthed by Russell Miller in his 1987 book Bare-Faced Messiah.

“By the time she was 21, Alexis was living with her mother and stepfather, Miles Hollister, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and she reportedly tried to reestablish contact with her father around that time. That contact didn't go well — Hubbard wrote back claiming her real father was actually Jack Parsons (the rocket scientist and occultist Sara had once been involved with), and he also alleged her mother had been a Nazi spy during WWII, suggesting the earlier legal battles had been a scheme to seize control of Scientology. It's a pretty telling final message from a father to an estranged daughter.”

Hubbard married his third wife, Mary Sue Whipp, in 1952.

She gave Hubbard four more children - Diana, Quentin, Suzette and Arthur - over the next six years.

Quentin committed suicide in Las Vegas in 1976, when he was 22 years old.

Two to three years later, Mary Sue Hubbard was among nine of Scientology insiders indicted for infiltrating the Internal Revenue Service and stealing more than 30,000 pages of government documents on the Hubbards and the Church of Scientology.

Mary Sue Hubbard was convicted and served one year of a four-year federal prison term.

According to Miller in Bare-Faced Messiah, Mary Sue took the fall for her husband, then lost out in a power struggle with David Miscavige, a second-generation Scientologist who assumed control of the movement after Hubbard’s death in January 1986.

Forty years later, Miscavige is still in charge.

As for Ron and Mary Sue’s three surviving children, Scientology spokesman Aron Mason told me back in 2001 that they are all still members of the church - either as parishioners or members of the staff. None of them, he said, wanted to talk to the press.

Other sources, however, said Arthur, Hubbard’s youngest child, had left the church and is an artist living in New York City. His older sister, Diana, retained a leadership role in the Scientology.

“They do their best,” Mason said back in 2001, “to lead normal, undistracted lives.”

Arthur, now 68, is an artist known for using his own blood in his paintings and blogging about the occult origins of the church his father founded.

So, today, four of Hubbard’s seven children are still alive. Only Diana, now 73, remains a practicing Scientologist.

One Hubbard descendent I did track down back in 2001 was Jamie Kennedy DeWolf, the grandson of Ronald DeWolf, making him Hubbard’s great-grandson.

Then 23, he lived in Vallejo and worked as a slam poet. He said his mother and ex-girlfriend have been visited by Scientology agents asking about his references to Scientology in his poems and his decision to appear at an anti-Scientology benefit.

“They can’t shut me up,” Kennedy told me twenty-five years ago. “I’ve made a career out of not giving a f-.”

Billed as the “Hellspawn Leprechaun,” Kennedy/DeWolf shared his great- grandfather’s red hair and in-your-face attitude.

“Genetically, I think we share some traits,” he told me. “In high school, a psychiatrist asked me if I had a history of mental illness in my family. I said, ‘Well, my great-grandfather was a cult leader.’ ”

Last week, I asked Claude for an update on the Hellspawn Leprechaun.

“He went on to have a fairly substantial career: he became a slam poetry champion, made award-winning films for the Youth Speaks Bigger Picture Project, toured with the performance trio The Suicide Kings, hosts the long-running Oakland variety show now called The Ruckus Revival (formerly Tourettes Without Regrets), and produced and performed for NPR's Snap Judgment, appearing on HBO's Def Poetry, 60 Minutes, and other outlets. The Village Voice named him one of the "Top 25 People Crippling Scientology" in 2011. He's continued periodically to discuss his family history in interviews and a one-man show called "The God and The Man," about his grandfather Ronald DeWolf's estrangement and his great-grandfather's mythology.”

Meanwhile, Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, has also gotten unwanted attention from family members who left the fold to tell all. His niece, Jenna Miscavige, a third-generation Scientologist, was born into the cult in 1984 to David’s older brother Ron. She grew up inside the Sea Organization, the church’s most devoted branch, after being separated from her parents at age eight and sent to a children’s commune.

Both her parents and grandparents eventually left the church, but allegedly weren’t allowed to take her with them.

Jenna met her husband, Dallas Hill, on a church mission to Australia. After discovering an anti-Scientology website, the two married and left the church in 2005, when they were in their early twenties.

Jenna began to speak out after a Scientology spokesperson denied that the organization had a disconnection policy requiring members to shun family who leave or criticize the church.

In 2013, Jenna Miscavige Hill published a memoir titled Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape. It takes the reader “behind the scenes of Scientology’s oppressive and alienating culture, detailing an environment rooted in control in which the most devoted followers often face the harshest punishments when they fall out of line.”

Jenna and other second and third generation defectors now run a website where they tell their stories and help other exit the cult.

One of those defectors, Astra Woodcraft, will be profiled next week in the third and final installment of this “Messiahs I Have Known” series on Hubbard and his church.