After more than 20 years of existence, after its spread around the world and its sales of books, CDs and its own brand of bottled water, Access is finally reaching kids. Douglas couldn't be happier. And neither could a 14-year-old kid in Colorado named Eli, who's watching the Austin conference online. Blossom Benedict, one of Douglas's Santa Barbara-based office workers, reads aloud Eli's e-mail to Douglas. Eli was so moved by the day's online workshop, "Energetic Synthesis of Communion." "I already feel a change coming in my life, and that is great. The ESC today was so powerful that I just started to cry. Thank you for this, and how it is just for us kids."
"Hey, thanks," Douglas says. "Thanks for being on here, Eli...This has been one of my hopes for a long time."
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"So you're coming at it from a sex-cult point of view," an Accessory says over the phone when asked about the "young children are incredibly sexy" line.
"You know what's interesting?" she says, "is that I have not experienced anything like that from any class I have ever taken with any facilitator. So I think that that completely is taken out of context." When asked what the context might be, she says, "I don't gain anything out of it by giving that to you." She doesn't want to talk for this story. (The most recent Access Level One manual states that, while "children are highly sexual beings," "it is certainly not appropriate for adults to have sex with children" — a sentiment that contradicts Access's bedrock principle that there is no right or wrong).
Access is most certainly not a "sex cult." It's conceivable it could be one day, since Douglas seems to add new tenets with each update of the secret manuals, which Accessories have to buy. Access is anything Douglas wants it to be. He's said that no two Access workshops are the same; the energy in the room at the time dictates whatever direction Access is going to take. And up until very recently, Access was simply too boring to be suspected of being a sex cult.
In hours of CDs and DVDs of Access classes from 2003 to 2005 reviewed by the Press, there's barely any talk about sex, and what talk there is, is focused on how to be "one" with your partner, just delivered in the maddeningly esoteric jargon of Access-speak in an attempt to sound new and profound.
The Accessory on the phone, because she is aware and unencumbered by simpleminded human judgment, only has to hear one question about sexy children to realize that this story is going to be a hatchet job. Like she said, there's nothing in it for her. And that's what it's all about.
And she's no doubt right. She's probably never heard anything about sex and kids in any of her classes. It might be such a fresh concept that it hasn't spread to all Accessories yet.
The thing is, Access might never have been born had Gary Major Douglas gotten out of real estate.
He'd done well for a while — by his estimation, making $100,000 a year. But by 1990, according to Santa Barbara court records, his business went belly up. He was sued by collection agencies, then filed for bankruptcy in 1993. His host of creditors included the IRS and the U.S. Department of Justice's tax division. He'd be paying off those federal liens for the next eight years. After real estate, he had a short stint in the United Way, but nothing seemed to be working for him.
That's when Douglas surveyed the metaphysical landscape of Santa Barbara and found an opening.
For years, Douglas had flitted on the outskirts of Scientology. His first wife, Laurie Alexander, ran a "field group" in the city — pulling in new recruits through Scientology's "auditing" process. The whole point of Scientology was to get "clear," to rid your body of subconscious memories of tragic events, which are called "engrams." People paid good money for this. Scientology had its own language, and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, had something of a fetish for dictionaries and what he considered to be the true definitions of everyday words.
After Douglas divorced Alexander in 1983, he married an ex-Scientologist named Patricia O'Hara. The two were close friends with another former Scientologist, named Mary Wernicke, who was roughly 40 years their senior. The English-born Wernicke rose up the Scientology ranks, working for the church's exclusive "Sea Org" unit. But after dedicating years of her life to the church, Wernicke and others grew disenchanted when Hubbard passed the reins to David Miscavige in the early 1980s. Miscavige began to restructure the organization, creating a rift. Wernicke was one of many higher-ups who left the church for the short-lived offshoot, the Advanced Ability Center. Douglas grew very close to Wernicke and even cared for her as her health began to fail in older age. He moved her into his Santa Barbara home and hired nurses to tend to her.
