TRANSCRIPT:
[Lawrence] Wright goes into really making a big deal about John Sweeney, about how the guy “never had such emotional and psychological pressure placed upon him than he did with Scientology,” even though he’d covered the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya and all this other kind of business.
And then he euphemizes Sweeney’s infamous meltdown on camera, by saying that “Sweeney shouted in an oddly slow cadence.” And he says—it’s a total euphemism of the guy having a meltdown in the middle of the set. And this whole thing is just—and I believe, I probably at some point went over this with Wright too, but even if I didn’t, I mean he is supposed to be an investigative journalist and be and have some sort of objectivity.
But Sweeney’s producer, Sarah Mole, and Sweeney himself, both told me unequivocally that that entire story that he did on Scientology, that Larry Wright is referring to here, was a trolling operation. There was no subject of investigation. There was no, you know—they didn’t even, they probably did, but they didn’t have a reason like the phony reason that Lawrence Wright gives in his book, for his “investigation.”
They literally set forth to do a trolling operation to see what reaction they could cause from the Church and that would be the subject of the—like in other words, “We’re investigating you. We are going to be as noisy and obnoxious as we can and we are going to document your reaction to that.” And that was the entire thing. So for him to position John Sweeney as “some seasoned brave guy who then undertook an even braver task to look into Scientology,” is complete and utter fiction.
