For Scientologists, Divorce Is No Simple Matter

Couples like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise who are looking to finish their marriages are approaching to find — by a Scientology classification — ways of operative things out. So divorce for Scientologists can mostly be a prolonged and formidable process, according to several former members of a church.

As in other religions, a ultimate retraction of a matrimony is “something that’s taken adult in a authorised court,” pronounced a Rev. Ann Pearce, a mouthpiece for a Church of Scientology of Washington State. “That’s between dual individuals, usually like anybody of any sacrament removing divorced,” she said, adding, “There’s no rite noticing divorce in a Church of Scientology.” But along a way, former church members say, couples face surprising marital conversing sessions and are infrequently pressured to use in-house divorce lawyers.

One former church member who underwent this form of marital conversing is Carmen Llywelyn, 37, an singer and photographer who was once married to Jason Lee, best famous for his starring purpose in a NBC comedy “My Name Is Earl.”

Ms. Llywelyn and Mr. Lee, a member of a Church of Scientology, married in 1995, and she assimilated a church, too. Five years after a matrimony was descending apart, she said.

Before determining to divorce, a integrate concluded to compensate for a form of conversing that Ms. Llywelyn pronounced entails sitting in a room responding questions while bending adult to a device famous as an E-meter, that Scientologists trust can detect untold thoughts.

She pronounced a chaplain, also famous as an auditor, questioned them for hours. “You do it until a needle is flat, until a pointer on a appurtenance doesn’t review any some-more thoughts,” she said. “They consider that once we unpack all these bad things, you’re going to tumble madly behind in adore with any other.” And when they didn’t, Ms. Llywelyn said, she was reserved an in-house lawyer. “Scientologists aren’t authorised to sue any other,” she said, given of a process to enclose any open disputes.

Ms. Pearce reliable that a church offers counseling, though declined to yield details, observant only, for serve information, deliberate a Web site.

Similarly, Karin Pouw, a mouthpiece for a Church of Scientology International, offering usually e-mailed links to a church’s central Web site, that provides small information about divorce, though offers this on a conversing program: “Scientology Marriage Counseling is an accurate procession for alleviating marital problems.” It also says that “chaplains have successfully salvaged thousands of marriages.”

The organization’s proceed to divorce can be gleaned from a papers and life of L. Ron Hubbard, a church’s founder, who was married 3 times. In “Introduction to Scientology Ethics,” he wrote, “Man has been raging about a high divorce rate, about a high pursuit turnover in plants, about labor disturbance and many other equipment all stemming from a same source — remarkable departures or light departures.”

A tighten reading of a book suggests that Mr. Hubbard was reduction endangered about a dissection of marriages than about carrying people mangle divided from Scientology. Sometimes students leave and never come back. “And that gives us some-more difficulty than many other things all combined,” he wrote.

Yet sometimes, according to Claire Headley, another former member, a church encourages divorce. Ms. Headley pronounced she was told that she contingency divorce her father of 12 years, Marc Headley, or be kicked out of a Religious Technology Center, a Scientology devalue nearby Hemet, Calif., that is famous as Gold Base. Ms. Headley pronounced that she had grown adult in a church and it was all she knew, though that she and her father began carrying difficulty after expressing doubts about church authorities.

“At a final notation we was loath on either we should usually divorce Marc,” pronounced Ms. Headley, who, like her husband, has given filed fit opposite a church. Instead, she left Gold Base in 2004, 3 weeks after he did, and together they changed to Colorado.

Being asked to divorce was not surprising during Gold Base, Ms. Headley said.

Steve Hall, who lives in Dallas, pronounced he blamed a church for a retraction of his 16-year matrimony to Sue Turton, after he motionless to leave a church and Gold Base in 2004.

“With tears streaming down both a faces, we hugged any other and afterwards she was taken away,” Mr. Hall wrote in an e-mail.

He remarkable that he was after labeled “declared,” that he and other former members contend means that nothing of his former friends and associates in a church are authorised to speak to him.

A counsel and orator for a church, Gary Soter, denied this account. “The church is wakeful that a handful of antagonistic and excommunicated members have done fake and/or dubious statements about a church and their practice within a church,” Mr. Soter wrote in an e-mail. “Mr. Hall’s allegations are false.”

Mr. Soter also wrote that he had oral with Ms. Turton, “who definitely denies Mr. Hall’s claim” and that she asked him to respond on her behalf. Mr. Soter’s comments came in response to a reporter’s ask to talk Ms. Turton.

“Ms. Turton and Mr. Hall jointly motionless to divorce on his depart from a Scientology eremite order,” Mr. Soter wrote.

“She is in a Church given it provides her with devout accomplishment and given she is doing her partial to assistance mankind,” he wrote, adding, “she loves her work and ‘loves what she is doing.’ ”

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