Tom Cruise’s daughter Isabella has recently surfaced in a promotional email espousing the benefits of Scientology training.
The historically private Isabella shared a lengthy testimony about her “auditing adventure,” urging fellow Scientology London followers, “WE ALL NEED TO DO THIS.” Journalist and Scientologist whistleblower Tony Ortega published the promotional email Sunday on his blog, The Underground Bunker, explaining that it was disseminated by a Scientology London staff member: “At the end of [the staff member’s] email, Scientologists are encouraged to click a link that will take them to find more information about getting trained as an auditor.”
Isabella’s testimonial contains a photo of her accompanied by a lengthy account of her journey to become an auditor in the Church of Scientology. Writing about an “internship” she underwent, Isabella effuses, “It turned out it was exactly what I needed… This IS what I had been searching for. The missing piece. Suddenly everything began to make sense.”
“I became that annoying girl in the org who would just talk endlessly about how incredible training is and how phenomenal the internship is. I’m sure a few people couldn’t deal just like I couldn’t. But I won’t stop with that because now I KNOW. We all need to do this. It’s hard work. It’s a lot of effort. It’s a few melt downs and running to the bathroom to have a mini episode, but it is worth everything because you will get through. This is a gift to yourself and so many others. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t going to be an auditor or aren’t going to join staff.”
“The internship, for me, is what made me a Scientologist. I don’t just believe the tech works now. I know without any doubt that it does,” Isabella concludes. Near the end of the testimony, she thanks her dad “for everything,” as well as Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard himself (“LRH”), writing, “It took a whole family and org to get me here.” (The Church of Scientology did not respond to requests for comment.)
Tony Ortega clarified Isabella’s account to The Daily Beast, saying, “It doesn’t mean what we use the word internship for. It’s just a practical training to be an auditor. So what she was doing was, she was being observed questioning somebody else. That’s why she’s talking about how hard it was to get through. Because if you do anything wrong, you’ve got to go back and do that whole exercise all over again. And it’s brutal. It’s physically brutal, it’s mentally brutal—they will spend hours and hours...I remember I talked to one guy, he spent weeks on a process just learning to turn the e-meter on. This is how obsessive they are.”
“So that’s the kind of thing she’s been through. It’s really demanding, but she’s saying this has changed her life—but then, she has to say that. She wants to convince you that this expensive internship she just went through was worth it (and it would be something like 14 or 15,000 pounds just for that internship).”
Isabella and her brother Connor grew up in the Church of Scientology. Their mother, Nicole Kidman, was allegedly targeted by the Church out of fear that she was turning her then-husband against them. As The Daily Beast previously reported, Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief claims that, “The Church of Scientology used a number of intimidation tactics to force Cruise to split from Nicole Kidman…Furthermore, [Marty Rathbun, an ex-Scientology official] says the Church of Scientology ‘re-educated’ Cruise’s adopted children with Kidman, Connor and Isabella, into turning against their mother so that Cruise could retain custody.”
In 2018, Nicole Kidman offered a rare comment on her current relationship with Connor and Isabella, telling Who magazine, “They are adults. They are able to make their own decisions. They have made choices to be Scientologists and as a mother, it’s my job to love them.”
In a phone conversation with The Daily Beast, Tony Ortega explained why Isabella’s decision to appear in promotional material is “remarkable” and “very unusual.”
“She and Connor have both been really quiet,” Ortega began. “Even Tom—Tom has been very, very quiet for the last few years, and Isabella and Connor have too, and so every six months or so some tabloid will say Tom’s about to leave Scientology, he wants to get back together with Katie, all this garbage.” Ortega would occasionally pick up on evidence to the contrary, “convincing me that Tom is as dedicated as ever—but this is so in your face! I mean, Isabella Cruise doing a promo for the London Scientology Org with a success story about her training…I was just so thrilled to see that she thanks her dad, and her aunt! Her aunt Cass. Because I’ve been trying to tell people that this family is in deep, that they really believe in this stuff. And this is evidence of it.”
Ortega added that this specific type of promo was noteworthy, and possibly suggested a renewed emphasis on training auditors, which has lapsed in recent years. “This is the first time I’ve seen any sort of celebrity really endorsing training in I can’t remember how long,” he continued. “So the fact that Isabella is being used to promote training as an auditor is really interesting to me. A lot of celebrities don’t want the church to use them in this way. So she’s making a conscious decision, that she’s okay with people knowing that she’s really down with this stuff.”
Analyzing the email on his blog, Ortega wrote, “Former Scientology Sea Org member and technical expert Sunny Pereira says the success story is vague about which particular program Bella has completed: ‘It doesn’t say anywhere which internship she’s talking about. But based on what she’s describing it’s probably a Class IV Internship, which means she can now audit someone from Objectives through Grade IV on the Bridge to Total Freedom.’”
“There are people who have auditor training and use it and people who don’t,” Ortega told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know if this means [Isabella’s] actually going to be down at the Org helping out…Sunny assumed it was Class IV training, and that would allow her to audit people up to grade four, but what’s important to me is that means she’s qualified to audit somebody on grade two. Grade two is fascinating because it essentially consists of the Joburg, the Johannesburg sec check, which is the most infamous of all of the sec checks. It’s an interrogation.”
Questions from the revised Joburg sec check, the “only valid security check,” include, “Have you ever raped anyone or been raped?” “Have you ever practiced sex with animals?” “Have you ever slept with a member of a race of another color?” “Have you had anything to do with a baby farm?” and “Have you ever used Dianetics or Scientology to force sex upon someone?”
Ortega concluded, “Every single person that’s at grade two or higher has been through this, all the celebrities have been through this, and now Isabella Cruise is qualified to do that—she is now qualified to interrogate people on the Joburg.”
