UPDATED with afternoon session: The oldest daughter of filmmaker Paul Haggis stated Monday there’s “circumstantial” proof of a Church of Scientology plot in opposition to her father, who’s going through a rape accusation in New York civil courtroom, after he walked away from the spiritual group and have become a vocal Scientology critic.
But Alissa Haggis, who give up the church as a youngster and got here out as homosexual years earlier than her father left Scientology, testified on cross-examination that she doesn’t know of any such plot. “There’s no way I could know that directly,” she stated, repeating a chorus of the Haggis protection.
A former high-ranking Scientology official, Mike Rinder, testified on Friday that “nobody would have any knowledge of that” as a result of Scientology makes use of subterfuge so successfully to assault and undermine its critics.
Another ex-Scientologist and Haggis pal, Shawna Lee Brakefield, stated she feared the lawsuit was the church retaliating in opposition to him. “Because the first thing I thought of was that the church was behind it,” Brakefield, a documentary filmmaker, stated in a 2019 deposition performed for jurors at this time, the ninth day of testimony.
“I don’t know for sure,” she added. “But yes the thought crossed my mind.”
When Haleigh Breest filed swimsuit in 2017 in opposition to Haggis accusing him of rape 4 years earlier, Brakefield stated she flashed again to an incident from 2009 or 2010 proper after Haggis give up the church. Brakefield was nonetheless a Scientologist, and a Scientology official named Tom Davis known as her to demand that she dig up any manufacturing and personnel recordsdata containing complaints about Haggis from her former job on the Screen Actor’s Guild.
“He was clearly after something negative,” Brakefield stated. She declined, she stated.
Brakefield left the church in the identical timeframe, saying, “It wasn’t working in my life the way I hoped it would.” It was unclear from the deposition if the demand for dust on Haggis performed an element.
Asked if she nonetheless feared Scientology, she paused for a number of seconds and in an emotional voice stated, “Anybody who speaks out publicly about the church is just a target for being destroyed. I’ve seen it happen.”
There isn’t any scarcity of public criticism of Scientology. Rinder, the previous church official, co-hosted with Leah Remini the Emmy-winning documentary sequence Scientology and the Aftermath, and the pair hosted a podcast, Fair Game, that ran by way of March detailing Scientology’s alleged misdeeds and strategies. More episodes are promised.
Haggis himself spoke at size about Scientology’s inside workings in a 2015 HBO documentary exposé Going Clear, about his journey out of a church that prized his movie star stature because the Oscar-winning screenwriter and director of Crash and Million Dollar Baby, and tapped his wealth to assist fill its coffers.
After he give up, he instructed New Yorker journal in 2011 that he feared “within two years you’re going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church.”
With her father seated on the protection desk and her two youthful sisters wanting on from the gallery, Alissa Haggis stated Monday that earlier than the lawsuit, she, her father and one other ex-Scientologist had been engaged on one other exposé concerning the church for HBO. They code-named it “Arizona” and mentioned it solely on encrypted e-mail, she stated.
But in September 2017, the Haggises’ companion, Mark “Marty” Rathbun, all of the sudden turned on them and wrote a weblog publish vilifying her father. Suddenly, Haggis testified, strangers had been going by way of her trash at her house in Los Angeles, and calling her and her associates to ask about her father — a repeat of the harassment she skilled after her father left the church.
A few months after the break with Rathbun, she testified, her father known as to inform her that their encrypted emails with Rathbun had been handed over to Scientology. And when the rape allegation surfaced, she stated she thought, “It has to be Marty.” Pressed by a lawyer for Breest, Ilann Maazel, she stated the one proof she had was “just circumstantial.” She additionally stated HBO scrapped the mission together with her father.
Maazel, exterior the courthouse, once more ridiculed the protection as a distraction. “They want this to be a case about Scientology and it’s not,” he stated. “This is not a Mike Rinder podcast.”
Haggis’ daughter, a screenwriter, screenplay editor and script researcher who has typically labored together with her father, testified that after they went to Rome in late 2012 to work on a movie, Third Person, a chiropractor treating her father’s continual again issues injured him severely sufficient that Haggis needed to bear surgical procedure. Lawyers for Haggis have stated they could additionally name a again damage knowledgeable to testify that Haggis couldn’t have carried out the violent rape described by Breest. Haggis himself might testify as early as Wednesday.
Alissa Haggis — who stated she has performed script work labored for Disney, Steven Spielberg and the James Bond films — stated that work is scarce for them each since Breest filed the lawsuit. Haggis, from Los Angeles, is married with two youngsters. “I don’t have much of a career now,” she stated. “Hollywood won’t hire me because I have the last name Haggis.”
Jurors additionally heard from a girl, Kyra Ross, who stated Haggis tried to kiss her in his condominium doorway after she had already instructed him a number of occasions that she wasn’t excited by him romantically as a result of he was a lot older. “I pulled away,” stated Ross, a psychotherapist in New York specializing in trauma circumstances. Haggis took the rejection with “calm, jovial, dry, sarcastic humor,” she stated. They stay associates, she stated, including, “I’m drawn to him because of his position on social justice.”
Brakefield, in her deposition, stated of Haggis, “He’s a stand-up guy” and “he’s sort of known for sticking up for the little guy.” She stated he by no means made a go at her, they usually had been alone collectively typically, and he was at all times “cordial, friendly, professional, joking, normal, relaxed.”
She stated the assault allegations leveled by Breest and 4 different girls testifying within the lawsuit don’t resemble any habits by Haggis that she noticed first-hand or heard about from the various girls in movie and tv they each know in widespread.
“No one has ever complained about Paul in any way,” she stated.
PREVIOUSLY, 12:34 PM: A pal of filmmaker Paul Haggis stated Monday that the one time he made a go at her, she let him know she wasn’t and that was that: The two moved previous the second and have become even nearer associates — fellow Canadians who bonded over backgammon. Later within the day, the protection known as on a professor of psychology and knowledgeable on reminiscence, Deborah Davis, who is also a guide for the attorneys representing Harvey Weinstein in his felony rape circumstances in New York, the place he was convicted, and in Los Angeles, the place his trial is underway.
Both witnesses testified on day 9 of the sexual assault civil trial for Haggis, the Oscar winner for Crash and Million Dollar Baby. The plaintiff, Haleigh Breest, has testified that Haggis raped her in his condominium in Soho in 2013 in an encounter Haggis says was consensual. Four different girls, all Canadian, have additionally testified within the case that Haggis assaulted or tried to assault them sexually after they had been alone with him.
Sarah McNally, founding father of the boutique bookstore cafe chain McNally Jackson Books in New York City whose flagship retailer is in Soho, instructed a distinct story for the protection. She stated the 2 met in 2015 or 2016, and that the go occurred after at his condominium as he poured them wine. “He moved to kiss me and I turned my head away,” McNally stated.
“He kind of shrugged and went, ‘Okay,’” McNally stated, saying “okay” in a high-pitched voice. “And then he taught me backgammon,” she added. McNally, 47, stated that of anybody whose advances she had ever rejected, Haggis had “the most easygoing, comical and friendly response.”
After the Breest lawsuit was filed, McNally stated she was requested by Haggis’ ex-wife to write down an announcement on his behalf. A lawyer for Breest, Ilann Maazel, learn from McNally’s e-mail reply to the request from January 2018. It started, “I haven’t known Paul long nor do I know him well, but here’s a statement.”
The proposed assertion went on to explain Haggis as “the menschiest of mensches, endlessly generous, kind, supportive, clever, and funny,” with “an instinctive devotion to making everyone around him feel happy and at ease.”
“In the absence of due process and in the presence of a vindictive church of scientology,” it concluded, “I find these accusations very difficult to believe.”
On cross-examination McNally stated that she has spoken with Haggis concerning the allegations by Breest, however that she doesn’t know Breest or any of the opposite 4 girls who testified in opposition to him. McNally stated she is aware of different feminine associates of Haggis’.
“Would you agree with me that people are complex?” Maazel requested. McNally agreed they’re. “Would you agree that people show different sides of themselves to people in different circumstances?” he requested. McNally stated it is determined by the circumstances.
Maazel then requested if, as a bookseller, she was acquainted with “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the nineteenth century gothic novel a few revered physician who makes use of a potion to show himself at will right into a monster after which again to his civilized self. A protection lawyer objected and the decide, Sabrina Kraus, agreed earlier than Maazel might ask McNally any extra about break up personalities.
The protection then known as Davis, who is also a colleague of Elizabeth Loftus, the knowledgeable on false recollections who testified for Weinstein and for Ghislaine Maxwell, the latter who was convicted of procuring underage ladies for her billionaire pal Jeffrey Epstein.
Davis at this time instructed jurors that folks bend recollections of occasions to suit their emotional wants and typically keep in mind issues that didn’t occur. “What’s left over time is the story we tell ourselves of what happened,” she stated. Davis additionally contradicted claims made by a psychologist for Breest’s authorized staff, Lisa Rocchio, about reminiscence and about myths that prejudice individuals in opposition to victims of rape.
Davis stated it “so very, very not” the case, as Rocchio testified, that our reminiscence of the “central details” of explicit occasions is extra correct and sturdy than the “peripheral details.”
“Memory for central details can be very, very inaccurate,” stated stated, influenced by emotional states, alcohol consumption, exterior information similar to news reviews, and the enter of different individuals. Lawyers for Haggis have argued that Breest was consuming, and might need taken an anti-anxiety capsule, on the night time of the movie-screening occasion in 2013 that she was working as a contract publicist earlier than she agreed to go house with Haggis, the place they each drank extra.
But analysis additionally exhibits that consuming doesn’t essentially impair an individual’s retention or recall of occasions, Davis stated underneath questioning by a lawyer for Breest, Zoe Salzman. Davis protested that the analysis is incomplete as a result of “there’s only so drunk you can get people in the laboratory.”
Salzman, on cross-examination, highlighted Davis’ connections to Weinstein and, over a number of objections, her skilled ties to Loftus, who testified within the New York Weinstein case that she is “not an expert in brain regions.”
Davis didn’t dispute that she was a jury guide who helped attorneys determine the right way to decide and affect panels, and that she has largely testified for defendants in civil rape circumstances. Salzman learn aloud from a deposition that Loftus gave on behalf of Kevin Spacey, who won a jury verdict in New York earlier this month in a federal civil case introduced by the actor Anthony Rapp accusing Spacey of rape.
Salzman additionally quoted again analysis from her colleague Loftus displaying that “traumatic experiences are better remembered than everyday experiences.”
Finally, in a dialogue of rape myths, Salzman learn a few of Davis’ personal revealed writings again to her: a passage that confirmed juries tended to disbelieve the central claims of people that acquired peripheral particulars unsuitable; and that jurors will search for methods to acquit an accused rapist “if the victim can be painted as unlikeable … or unworthy of justice.”
“I said it was a review of the research,” Davis stated curtly.