John Travolta Defends Scientology From ‘Going Clear’: The Church Has Been “So Beautiful for Me”

John Travolta says he has not seen Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and has no plans to do so.

The actor and member of the Church of Scientology said he has not experienced any of the negative things depicted in Alex Gibney‘s documentary about the church. 

“I haven’t experienced anything that the hearsay has [claimed], so why would I communicate something that wasn’t true for me?” Travolta said in an interview with The Tampa Bay Times. “It wouldn’t make sense, nor would it for Tom (Cruise), I imagine.”

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He went on to say the church helped him through personal tragedies, including the death of his son Jett in 2009.

“I’ve been brought through storms that were insurmountable,” he said, adding Scientology has “been so beautiful for me, that I can’t even imagine attacking it.”

Going Clear, based on Lawrence Wright’s book, premiered on HBO on March 16. It makes a number of claims about Scientology, including that L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology as a way to bolster his declining book sales and that the Church pays its members between six and 40 cents an hour for labor services. The Church has vehemently denied the claims made in the documentary.

“In two hours this film racks up more falsehoods, errors, embellished tales and blatant omissions than were committed by Rolling Stone, Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly combined. By our calculation, the film on average includes at least one major error every two minutes,” the Church wrote in a letter to The Hollywood Reporter last month in response to the film.

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