Lucas Le Gall is an unpredictable man. With a furious independence, coupled with great frankness. Which can lead to some disconcerting moments. Like on this day in June, when we were supposed to photograph him. The interested party, 58 years old, simply cancelled, at the last moment. “I don’t see the point anymore”, he even whispered to us, by way of apology, a few minutes before the deadline.
It’s hard to blame the character. Breaking free is more than just a motto for him. It’s a matter of survival: a Scientologist child, he “escaped” from the organization’s Californian stronghold at the age of 18. Since then, he has never stopped fighting all forms of restraint. Even if it means taking a few liberties with the meetings he’s given, in addition to cultivating a certain propensity for irreverence.
For fear that the “immortals”, the followers, will find him, he will not give his address or real name – he did let it slip once, without realizing it, before making us promise not to say anything. On the phone, he leads the exchanges, drawing his own lessons from the defining moments of his life, from a violent and disillusioning childhood to an alienating boarding school in Denmark, the European headquarters of Scientology, before America, then the life after, the real one.
The difficulty of joining
Free, but not flippant: he analyzes, weighs, considers each idea before making it his own. One of the stigmata he keeps from his early years of having to take literally what the leaders of Scientology told him. He also takes away from it a strong tendency to question everything. The great societal narratives, the ideologies, the corporate narratives, the political parties, from the PS, which he quickly left after joining, to the RN, whose sudden fervor he arouses inspires great mistrust in him. Even Didier Raoult, and his messianic overtones. They give him the shivers – “Thousands of people ready to entrust their lives to a single guy, or a single organization, don’t you find that strange?”, he asks us, as if to reassure himself.
The sixty-year-old doesn’t adhere to anything. Or rather, he doesn’t fully adhere to much anymore. Like a piece of used tape that doesn’t really stick anymore after being repositioned. “Not the first fish to bite the hook, but still a bit hookable, we all are, nothing protects us against irrational beliefs,” he sums up. Advantage: he has no problem going back on his positions when they have cooled. Disadvantage: for the first ten years of his free life, he doesn’t hold a job, and doesn’t tolerate any directives.
The stupid orders remind him of his adolescence. He spent it doing his classes for the Church of Scientology, in Copenhagen, in a building of the movement. He does the dishes, the cleaning, some administrative tasks. One day, around the age of 15, he is sent to redo the fiberglass in the cellar, near the boiler room. 50°C, dust everywhere, his back bent to scream in pain. Not allowed to urinate, nor to sit down. Just like that, because he dared to laugh during his small tasks. “I go down to 50 kilos, my hair is short, my eyes are yellow.” One of the worst periods.
“A few hundred” followers in France
This is not the first time he has told this story. He has written a book about it, A billion years, published in 2020 by éditions du Cherche midi. A rich story, which testifies to his great interest in literature, one of the passions that allowed him to hold on. For a long time, his pages remained blank. The fear of appearing to complain, of putting his miseries before those of others. It was the recent installation of Scientology on the outskirts of the Olympic village, in Seine-Saint-Denis, that made him change his mind.
Created in 1952 in the United States, and still very popular there, Scientology advocates “spiritual elevation” through moral and social asceticism. It recommends “spiritual rehabilitations”, with rites, a very particular affection for the sauna, supposed to purify, and the use of numerous pseudo-psychological interviews. A recipe which, if well applied, would allow one to become what the organization calls a “tethan”, an immortal, “unlimited” being. So many precepts which appear in a sort of “bible”, Dianeticsa blend of psychoanalysis and theories of the mind, written by L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction author and founder of the movement.
Several trials, including a conviction in 2012 for fraud, have tarnished the image of Scientology in France, where it no longer has any famous representatives, such as Tom Cruise in the United States. While in 2005 the organization said it had 40,000 French members, a parliamentary commission of inquiry put the figure at 2,000 instead. “It boils down to a few hundred now,” believes Lucas Le Gall, who has now completely broken with the organization. A list is circulating on the Internet, although its exact origin is not known. Dating from 2015, it lists all the French people whose links are proven. There are fewer than 400 of them.
No cage holds believers. Except a simple contract without legal value that “engages” followers for “a billion years”. And the “control”, the isolation, the brainwashing, the promises and the manipulation, erected as a collective philosophy by the organization, that all the ex-followers tell of. “All believers denounce each other constantly. There is a great internal competition to become the best Scientologist, and an assumed culture of denunciation, which reinforces the pressure to apply the precepts”, illustrates our repentant.
“Marketing Director” at 16 and a half
Lucas Le Gall thought about leaving at a very young age. But where? To his parents, “idiots and fanatics”, where he led, from the age of 10, the organization’s “communication” classes, in which apprentice followers must walk towards a wall while repeating: “Do fish swim, do fish fly” until they confuse everything? With the “wog”, the damned non-Scientologists, these ignorant people doomed to a terrible fate, according to the movement’s thinkers? He knew nothing of this world at the time. “I learned about Panini stickers two years ago.”
As a teenager, young Lucas Le Gall already found Scientologists “very unfair and not very smart”, whereas the few people he saw from outside seemed “so beautiful, so joyful”. But in the absence of an alternative, he decided to learn the ropes, without saying anything. Clever and diligent, he quickly climbed the ladder, until he was appointed “marketing director”. “A farce, I was not competent.” The founders of the movement asked him to join them in the United States, to take on even more important positions. He was only 16 and a half years old.
It was once he arrived in the ultra-secure American pavilions, a hundred kilometers east of Los Angeles, where the movement’s bigwigs reside, that he decided to leave. “I was close to Hubbard’s inner circle. They wanted to entrust me with the intimidation tasks of the OSA, a kind of internal special service, which can be violent. It was out of the question.” His parents beat him up. The idea of having to do so made him feel sick.
Escape, “The Wall” and “Star Wars”
The young man leaves in the middle of the night, in shorts and a t-shirt, with enough money to take a flight to Paris and sleep in a hotel. First contact with the outside world: The Wallthe film about Pink Floyd released in 1982. He saw it three times in a row. He faked his CV, got hired at Sony. And caught up with literature, which he devoured as a stowaway, at the Fnac, in the aisles, leaving empty-handed after having wrung out several books.
When everyone adopts an identity in childhood, he is forced to build a new one in adulthood. He gradually reconnects with his body. He had learned to forget it, within Scientology. “I couldn’t connect the notion of hunger to the notion of eating, for example. And I recently discovered that I was not a size 41 but a size 43. I suffered a lot during my childhood, so, in the end, it was as if I had cut myself off from my sensations. For me, pain was normal. Being well, I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls.
He spends “the price of a Porsche” to save his teeth, rotten because of a holy horror of medicine cultivated by Scientology. At first, friendly relations are difficult for him. He does not share the codes. “Michael Jackson, Star WarsI don’t know.” But eventually, he settled down, met more people, found love, had children – “I was afraid of being violent for a long time, too.” And ended up keeping a job. The title? “Relational fracture manager.” His hasn’t completely healed. But it doesn’t really cause him any more problems.
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