On June 1, 2026, the California Court of Appeal accepted an amicus curiae brief from the Church of Scientology International in support of Daniel Masterson’s appeal of his rape conviction.[1]
The Church of Scientology is now — publicly and openly — spending millions of dollars to defend Scientologist Danny Masterson who was convicted of three counts of forcible rape by a Los Angeles jury.
Scientology, — and the entire meaning of L. Ron Hubbard’s life and work — now comes down to the defense of a convicted serial rapist. This is what billionaire Bob Duggan’s donations pay for. This is what Grant Cardone’s donations pay for.
Scientology’s claimed purpose:
A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where Man is free to rise to greater heights.
What L. Ron Hubbard said Scientology techniques are capable of:
You can rape women without their knowing it, communicate suicide messages to your enemies as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco parkway to the mayor for cash, evolve the best way of protecting or destroying communism…
In his notorious Admissions, Hubbard wrote of women:
Your own pleasure is not dependent on the woman’s. You are interested only in your own sexual pleasure. If she gets any that is all right but not vital. Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure. Their bodies thrill you. If they repel you, it merely means they themselves are too frigid or prudish to be bothered with. They are unimportant in bed except as they thrill you. Your sexual power is magnificent and they know it. If they are afraid of it, that is their loss. You are not affected by it.
You have no fear if they conceive. What if they do? You do not care. Pour it into them and let fate decide.
The slipperier they are the more you enjoy it because it means their mucous is running madly with pleasure.
There is nothing wrong in the sex act. Nothing any woman may say can change your opinion. You are a master. You are as sensitive and sexy as Pan. Lord help women when you begin to fondle them. You are master of their bodies, master of their souls as you may consciously wish. You have no karma to pay for these acts. You cannot now accumulate karma for you are a master adept.
(Click here and scroll down to the bottom of this page to read Hubbard’s Admissions in PDF form)
Given L. Ron Hubbard’s view of women and the casualness with which he wrote about raping women without their knowledge, it should not be surprising that David Miscavige ordered and authorized the defense of serial rapist Danny Masterson.
Oral argument is set for June 25. The Church’s brief asks the court to overturn the conviction of a man serving 30 years to life for raping two women — both of whom were Scientologists in good standing at the time of the assaults — on the ground that the trial mischaracterized Scientology Scripture and displayed hostility toward the faith.
This document deserves close reading — scroll down to read it.
In this legal filing, Scientology has done something it almost never does voluntarily: it has filed, on the public record, under the signatures of elite appellate counsel, a series of categorical declarations about what its own doctrine says. Those declarations can now be checked against the policy archive. We have spent sixteen years reading that archive. The gaps are measurable, and we measure some of them below.
How We Got Here: Rejected, Revised, Resubmitted, Accepted: The Church’s first attempt at this intervention failed. In December 2025, CSI filed an initial amicus brief — with fourteen additional religious organizations seeking to join — and the Second Appellate District rejected it without explanation, along with the companion fourteen-party filing.[2]
The Church did not take the hint. On May 8, 2026, CSI resubmitted a revised brief through Schaerr | Jaffe LLP — Gene Schaerr is one of the most prominent religious-liberty appellate specialists in the country — and Cohen Williams LLP of Los Angeles. This time the court accepted it, and the panel will hear argument on June 25.[3]
Pause on what that persistence signifies. Tabloid reports have claimed for two years that Masterson was quietly declared a suppressive person and cast out. The documentary record now establishes the opposite: the Church of Scientology International — the Mother Church, the entity that describes itself in this very filing as responsible for defending the religion and preventing the misuse of its doctrine[4] — has twice mobilized premier constitutional counsel to free a convicted serial rapist. Whatever the Church’s internal ethics machinery is for, it is not for this.
What the Brief Argues: The brief advances two constitutional theories. First, ecclesiastical abstention: the trial court violated the First Amendment by interpreting Scientology Scripture itself, by refusing to defer to the Church’s authoritative declaration of its own doctrine, and by allowing a “biased” expert — Claire Headley — to testify about Scientology beliefs and practices “for the truth of the matter.” Second, religious hostility under Masterpiece Cakeshop: the brief catalogs statements and rulings by Judge Charlaine Olmedo and the prosecutors that it characterizes as animus toward the faith, including the use of gang-evidence jury instructions modified for Scientology and the questioning of courtroom spectators suspected of Church affiliation.[5]
The doctrinal centerpiece is the trial court’s finding that written Scientology doctrine prohibits one Scientologist from reporting another Scientologist in good standing to outside law enforcement — the finding that explained the complaining witnesses’ years-long delays in reporting and anchored their credibility. The brief declares this finding “dead wrong,” insists no such doctrine exists anywhere in Scripture, and offers an extended exegesis of the phrase “delivering up the person of a Scientologist,” complete with a 1961 Oxford English Dictionary definition and an analogy to Vichy France.
The McCarthy Gambit: The Real Prize Is Doctrinal Immunity: The brief’s load-bearing authority is McCarthy v. Fuller, a Seventh Circuit case holding that once the Holy See declared a woman was not a nun, no court or jury could question it.[6]
The Church’s argument runs: CSI filed an authoritative declaration of Scientology doctrine; therefore the trial court was constitutionally bound to accept it; therefore Claire Headley’s contrary testimony should never have reached the jury.
The brief goes further still, arguing in a footnote that even dueling experts would have been unconstitutional — that allowing Masterson his own expert alongside the State’s would merely have doubled the violation.[7]
Understand what is actually being requested. If the Court of Appeal adopts this rule, then in every future proceeding — the Jane Does’ pending civil harassment suit, refund litigation, fraud claims, labor cases — testimony from former members about how Scientology policies actually operate becomes inadmissible the moment CSI files a contrary declaration.
The Church of Scientology wants to become the sole admissible interpreter of the very documents at issue in litigation against it, with no rebuttal permitted from the people who lived under those policies.
Masterson’s conviction is the vehicle. Doctrinal immunity is the destination.
Scientology wants to be a law unto itself where pedophiles, rapists, murderers, and other criminals in its ranks are not subject to secular law — and no ex-Scientology experts are ever allowed to testify about Scientology’s internal practices.
Scientology wants to destroy any possibility of expert testimony and thereby destroy justice for its victims.
The Declarations vs. the Archive: To make its argument, the Church had to commit itself to specific, categorical claims about its own Scripture. Each is now a fixed institutional statement on a court record, and each can be laid beside the primary documents. We examine four.
Fair Game: The brief declares: “There is no doctrine of ‘Fair Game’ within the Scientology religion,” describes the term as something “intentionally misinterpreted by anti-Scientologists,” and states the term was canceled in 1968 and has not appeared in authorized Scripture for over 57 years.[8]
The archive says more. Hubbard’s policy of October 18, 1967 provided that a declared enemy was “Fair game” and could be “deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist.”[9]
The October 21, 1968 cancellation the brief invokes canceled the use of the term because, in Hubbard’s own words, “It causes bad public relations” — and then stated expressly: “This P/L does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an SP.”[10]
The brief tells the court the label was retired. It does not tell the court that the cancellation order preserved the conduct. That distinction was litigated and documented in California courts decades ago.
Equal justice for all: The brief declares that “Scientology Ethics Applies Equally to All Scientologists,” that no Scripture provides special treatment for any parishioner, “celebrity or otherwise,” and that the prosecution’s “untouchable celebrity” theory is fabricated. Hubbard’s Ethics Protection policy of September 1, 1965 says otherwise: it shields staff with high statistics from ethics actions and directs that when someone reports a high-statistic member, the proper subject of investigation is the person who filed the report.[11]
The prosecution’s “up stat” argument at trial was not an invention. It was a paraphrase of named, dated Hubbard policy — the exact doctrinal mechanism by which a celebrity producing money and public relations value for the Church is insulated from the consequences of internal complaints, and the complainant becomes the target.
Reporting to law enforcement: The brief devotes pages to the phrase “delivering up the person of a Scientologist” and assures the court that nothing in doctrine discourages reporting crimes. It is conspicuously quiet about a neighboring entry on the same Suppressive Acts list: reporting or threatening to report a Scientologist to civil authorities in an effort to suppress Scientology is itself a High Crime.[12]
In his HCO Policy Letter of 23 Dec 1965 RB entitled Suppressive Acts, Suppression of Scientology and Scientologists, L. Ron Hubbard stated that any public disavowal of Scientology is a high crime. For a “source” to tell the media that Prepon “is not currently active in the Church” constitutes a public disavowal. Hubbard does not allow any middle ground nor does David Miscavige. Tom Cruise has not walked away nor has John Travolta.
Some excerpts from Hubbard’s bulletin (shown below) offers us an insight into what Hubbard considered to be high crimes. The list is quite bizarre inasmuch as Hubbard calls murder, arson, blackmail, and sexually perverted conduct high crimes while also calling the public disavowal of Scientology, reporting Scientologists to the civil authorities, and suing the Church of Scientology high crimes.
A SUPPRESSIVE PERSON or GROUP is one that actively seeks to suppress or damage Scientology or a Scientologist by suppressive acts.
SUPPRESSIVE ACTS are acts calculated to impede or destroy Scientology or a Scientologist and which are listed at length in this policy letter.
Suppressive acts are defined as actions or omissions undertaken to knowingly suppress, reduce or impede Scientology or Scientologists.
Such suppressive acts include:
Any felony (such as murder, arson, etc.) against person or property.
Sexual or sexually perverted conduct contrary to the well-being or good state of mind of a Scientologist in good standing or under the charge of Scientology, such as a student or a preclear.
Blackmail of Scientologists or Scientology organizations threatened or accomplished—in which case the crime being used for blackmail purposes becomes fully outside the reach of Ethics and is absolved by the fact of blackmail unless repeated.
Public disavowal of Scientology or Scientologists in good standing with Scientology organizations.
Public statements against Scientology or Scientologists but not to Committees of Evidence duly convened.
Proposing, advising or voting for legislation or ordinances, rules or laws directed toward the suppression of Scientology.
Reporting or threatening to report Scientology or Scientologists to civil authorities in an effort to suppress Scientology or Scientologists from practicing or receiving standard Scientology.
Bringing civil suit against any Scientology organization or Scientologist, including the nonpayment of bills or failure to refund, without first calling the matter to the attention of the International Justice Chief and receiving a reply.
Writing anti-Scientology letters to the press or giving anti-Scientology or anti-Scientologist data to the press.
Every Scientologist contemplating a police report about a celebrity in good standing must ask who decides whether her report constitutes suppression — and the answer is the Church’s own justice machinery, the same machinery the Ethics Protection policy aims at the complainant. A parishioner does not need a policy that says “never call the police” in those words. She needs only to understand how these provisions operate together. The complaining witnesses testified that they understood exactly that.
“Pulled it in.” The brief declares the phrase appears nowhere in Scripture and that no doctrine assigns responsibility to victims.[13]
The phrase is argot; the doctrine is the overt-motivator sequence, which teaches that the harms befalling a person are drawn to them by their own prior transgressions. The brief refutes a colloquialism while leaving the underlying doctrine — the one every trained Scientologist actually learns — unaddressed. This is the rhetorical method of the entire document: precise denial of the words, silence about the mechanism.
The Heretic Problem: There is an irony running through the brief that a careful panel will not miss. The document’s second argument is that the State unconstitutionally displayed hostility toward Scientology — “othering,” in the brief’s vocabulary. Yet the brief itself describes Claire Headley as an “apostate,” a “heretic,” a “literal heretic,” “defrocked,” “excommunicated,” driven by a “20-year vendetta,” offering “heretical testimony.”[14]
A filing that condemns religious othering in the voice of a heresy prosecution is making the State’s point for it. And the brief’s account of Headley’s federal lawsuit — that her forced-labor case “collapsed” as meritless — omits what the Ninth Circuit actually held: that the ministerial exception barred the claims, a ruling about justiciability, not about whether the conduct she described occurred.[15]
What This Filing Reveals About Scientology’s Priorities: Step back from the doctrine and look at the institutional behavior, because the brief is itself a primary source on how Scientology allocates its protective machinery. The two women Masterson was convicted of raping were Scientologists in good standing when they say they were assaulted. The Church’s ecclesiastical apparatus produced nothing for them.
What mobilized the Mother Church — twice, through rejection and resubmission, at a cost competent observers estimate in the high six figures — was the moment its doctrine entered an evidentiary record. The institution’s own filing states its mission: defending the religion and preventing the misuse of its doctrine. Members are not mentioned. Victims appear in the brief only as “complaining witnesses” whose credibility must be dismantled.
What Happens on June 25: The appeal is fully briefed; Masterson’s habeas petition is being considered concurrently but will not be argued.[16]
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The questions to watch at oral argument: whether the panel engages the McCarthy theory at all, or treats the Scientology evidence under ordinary state-of-mind and victim-credibility doctrine, where testimony about what the witnesses believed their church required does not ask any court to decide religious truth; whether the Attorney General’s office knows the policy archive well enough to put the Ethics Protection policy and the Fair Game cancellation’s preserved-conduct clause in front of the justices; and whether anyone asks Scientology’s counsel the question this brief is constructed to avoid — if doctrine so plainly commands reporting crimes to police, why did the Church’s own justice system, over two decades and multiple internal reports about Masterson, never produce one.
[1] Amicus Curiae Brief of the Church of Scientology International in Support of Defendant and Appellant, People v. Masterson, No. B333069 (Cal. Ct. App., 2d Dist., Div. 2), filed May 8, 2026, received June 1, 2026. Counsel: Gene C. Schaerr and James C. Phillips, Schaerr | Jaffe LLP (pro hac vice); Alyssa D. Bell, Cohen Williams LLP.
[2] Tony Ortega, “Scientology Trying to Intervene with Court to Help Danny Masterson Get Out of Prison,” The Underground Bunker, December 2025; Tony Ortega, “Court Denies Danny Masterson’s Request to Combine His Appeal and Habeas Petition,” The Underground Bunker, January 2026 (noting the court “rejected the Church of Scientology’s attempt to sway the case with an amicus brief”).
[3] Tony Ortega, “Scientology Tries Again to Intervene for Danny Masterson by Resubmitting Its Amicus Brief,” The Underground Bunker, May 2026; Tony Ortega, “Appeals Court Accepts Scientology Amicus on Behalf of Danny Masterson,” The Underground Bunker, June 2026 (noting oral argument set for June 25, 2026).
[4] Amicus Brief at 10 (CSI “is responsible for defending the Scientology religion and preventing the misuse of its doctrine”).
[5] Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. 617 (2018).
[6] McCarthy v. Fuller, 714 F.3d 971 (7th Cir. 2013).
[7] Amicus Brief at 46 n.13 (arguing that even opposing expert witnesses on religious belief and practice would have “doubl[ed] the amount of constitutionally prohibited conduct”).
[8] Amicus Brief at 32-33.
[9] HCO Policy Letter of 18 October 1967, Issue IV, “Penalties for Lower Conditions” (providing that a person declared an enemy is “Fair game” and “[m]ay be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed”). This policy has been quoted and authenticated in published California litigation, including Church of Scientology of California v. Armstrong and Wollersheim v. Church of Scientology.
[10] HCO Policy Letter of 21 October 1968, “Cancellation of Fair Game” (“The practice of declaring people FAIR GAME will cease. FAIR GAME may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations. This P/L does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an SP.”).
[11] HCO Policy Letter of 1 September 1965, “Ethics Protection” (providing that staff with high statistics are protected from ethics actions and directing that when a high-statistic staff member is reported, the proper subject of investigation is the person who filed the report).
[12] L. Ron Hubbard, Introduction to Scientology Ethics, “Suppressive Acts” (listing among High Crimes “[r]eporting or threatening to report a Scientologist or Scientologists to civil authorities in an effort to suppress Scientology or Scientologists from practicing or receiving standard Scientology”).
[13] Amicus Brief at 27 (“The phrase ‘pulled it in’ does not appear in Scientology Scripture”). The overt-motivator sequence is set out across Hubbard’s ethics and auditing materials, including Introduction to Scientology Ethics and the Hubbard Professional Course materials.
[14] Amicus Brief at 9, 22, 34, 37, 40, 45-46, 52-54, 57 (describing the State’s expert and other former members as “apostate,” “heretic,” a “literal heretic,” “defrocked,” “excommunicated,” possessed of a “20-year vendetta,” and offering “heretical testimony”).
[15] Headley v. Church of Scientology International, 687 F.3d 1173 (9th Cir. 2012).
[16] Masterson was convicted of two counts of forcible rape on May 31, 2023, and sentenced to 30 years to life in September 2023. His direct appeal (B333069) is fully briefed; a separate habeas petition filed December 1, 2025 is being considered concurrently but was not consolidated and will not be argued.