Book bombshell. Ron Miscavige plans to write a book about his son, Scientology leader David Miscavige, the Daily Mail reports. The 79-year-old has reportedly signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press and could likely be published as early as next spring.
The tentative title, If He Dies, He Dies, has meaning to Miscavige Sr. According to Daily Mail, David, 55, allegedly paid two men $10,000 a week for more than a year to follow his father while he was in his ’70s. In 2013, the men told police that they approached Miscavige Sr. at one point when it appeared he was having a heart attack. (He really was just reaching for his phone.) Instead of trying to help, David told the men to back off. “If he dies, he dies,” David reportedly said. “Don’t intervene.”
Miscavige Sr. – who now lives in Wisconsin near his wife’s family – reportedly joined the Church of Scientology in the 1970s to help find a cure for David’s asthma, but left in 2012. David, who has been the church leader since 1986 and has a famously close friendship with celeb member Tom Cruise, has since denied that he ever asked others to keep an eye on his father.
“Mr. Miscavige has always taken care of his father and continues to do so. Beyond that, as a matter of policy, neither the Church nor Mr. Miscavige comments on members of his family. The Church knows nothing beyond media reports about any purported book,” Scientology spokesman Karen Pouw said in a statement, via Daily Mail.
“As for the purported emergency incident involving an investigator and the second-hand account of an alleged conversation containing a despicably false quote, Mr. Miscavige’s attorney, Michael Lee Hertzberg, is on record stating that Mr. Miscavige does not know the investigator, has never heard of the investigator, has never met the investigator, has never spoken to the investigator, never hired the investigator and never directed any investigations by him,” the statement continued. “So let me be clear: No such conversation with Mr. Miscavige ever took place and any claim that one did is provable bulls—t.”
The new development comes nearly three months after HBO premiered the Scientology documentary, Going Clear. “None of the discredited sources represent the Scientology religion,” representatives from the Church of Scientology said in response at the time. “The millions of parishioners worldwide who do represent it were intentionally ignored.”
