page_title: The Hole (Scientology)
section_title: Life in the Hole
hierarchical_section_title: The Hole (Scientology) / Life in the Hole
caption_attribution_description: The Hole at Gold Base, Gilman Hot Springs, California
context_page_description: The Hole is the unofficial nickname of a facility—also known as the SP Hole, the A to E Room, or the CMO Int trailers—operated by the Church of Scientology on Gold Base, its compound near the town of Hemet in Riverside County, California, United States. Dozens of its senior executives have reportedly been confined within the building for months or years. It consists of a set of double-wide trailers within a Scientology compound, joined together to form a suite of offices which were formerly used by the Church's international management team. According to former members of Scientology and media reports, from 2004 the Church's leader David Miscavige sent dozens of senior Scientology executives to the Hole. The Tampa Bay Times described it in a January 2013 article as:
  a place of confinement and humiliation where Scientology's management culture — always demanding — grew extreme. Inside, a who's who of Scientology leadership went at each other with brutal tongue lashings, and even hands and fists. They intimidated each other into crawling on their knees and standing in trash cans and confessing to things they hadn't done.
context_section_description: From 2004 to 2007, the number of people confined in the Hole increased from 40 to up to 100. They slept in cots or sleeping bags, squeezed into every available floor space or on desktops. Men would sleep around the conference table while women slept in cubicles and small offices around the main conference room. They were so crowded that there was barely any room to move, according to one of those present: "Everyone sleeping with only about six inches on either side. Above you. Below you. Getting up in the middle of the night, you'd disturb everyone." They were only allowed to leave to attend Scientology events or to be taken to a shower in a nearby maintenance garage, to which they were taken two at a time under guard. Food was brought to them on golf carts from the Gold Base mess hall, as the executives were not allowed to eat with the rest of the staff, and they were only given ten to fifteen minutes to eat. According to one of the executives, the food was "like leftovers, slop, bits of meat, soupy kind of leftovers thrown into a pot and cooked and barely edible." The building was said to be infested with ants and on several occasions the electricity was turned off, causing the temperature inside to reach 106 °F (41 °C) due to the lack of air conditioning.
  Brousseau commented that when he visited the Hole occasionally, "you could smell that people live here, people sleep here." He saw the executives being marched elsewhere on the base to take showers; his impression was that "they looked like they were being marched to the gallows – they just looked lifeless, with no purpose. Very hang-dog, droopy shoulders, slouchy, very sad, inward-looking creatures." Brousseau said that they were only allowed out "at certain times of day that would be adjudicated to be the least likely time when DM [Miscavige] would run into them if he was on the property. They would march out to Old Gilman House to take a shower and come back because they had no shower facilities inside the Hole. Later that got upgraded to let them go down to the garage." Sometimes executives were allowed out for a short time to attend Scientology events, but many ended up spending months or even years in the Hole.
  The individuals who were later named by the media as being held in the Hole represented a who's who of Scientology's top management. They included Debbie Cook, the head of the Church of Scientology Flag Service Organization; Heber Jentzsch, the President of the Church of Scientology International; Guillaume Lesevre, the Executive Director International and the church's top management official; Mark Rathbun, the Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center; Wendell Reynolds, the International Finance Director; Mike Rinder, the Commanding Officer of the Office of Special Affairs; Kurt Weiland, director of external affairs for the Office of Special Affairs; Marc Yager, the Commanding Officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization; and Norman Starkey, the former captain of Hubbard's ship, the Apollo.
  Executives who eventually escaped from the Hole have said that its occupants were forced to practice group confessions in which they would confess supposed transgressions against Miscavige, bad thoughts that they had had about Scientology and disclose their sexual fantasies. Cook, who spent seven weeks in the Hole in 2007, said that "most of the time the activities [in the Hole] were either you confessing your own sins or bad things that you'd done, or getting other people to confess theirs." Rinder commented on the bizarre personal dynamics of the Hole: "These were your friends, people you had traveled with. But then, you get in the Hole? You can't trust anybody."
  Rinder told the Tampa Bay Times that interrogations "would be carried out by whoever happened to be there – twenty people, thirty people, fifty people, all standing up and screaming at you, and ultimately it sort of devolved into physical violence, torture, to extricate these 'confessions' out of people." According to Rinder, the confessions were sometimes dictated by Miscavige, but more us
caption: Aerial view of the Hole (the white-roofed building in the center of the photo). The maintenance garage, where makeshift showers were set up for the confined executives, is visible at the bottom right across the road
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