Revealed: The Secrets of How Scientology Blew Up ‘South Park’

Isaac Hayes was a lot of things. Legendary soul singer. Honorary king of a region in Ghana. And, despite his son’s current lawsuit against Donald Trump for using his music at MAGA rallies, a friend of conservative politicians who “did not view Republicans or the Republican Party negatively while he was alive.”

But perhaps the most important identity of Hayes’ life, which ended at just 65 years old in 2008, was as a member of the Church of Scientology.

When Isaac Hayes announced in a press release on March 13, 2006 that he was leaving the Comedy Central show South Park, he blamed the show's intolerance toward religion—but he notably did not use the word "Scientology."

Ever since then, people have debated whether the legendary “Shaft” singer was really walking away from his lucrative run as South Park’s Chef because creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker had been poking fun at all religions, or specifically because they had satirized Scientology so effectively just a few months earlier, in an episode that aired on November 16, 2005.

The "Trapped in the Closet" episode suggested cheekily that Scientology celebrities John Travolta and Tom Cruise were secretly gay. And it traced Stan's rise in the church when it is discovered he has high thetan levels. But perhaps the thing the episode is most remembered for is the way Scientology's actual arcane beliefs regarding a galactic overlord named Xenu were portrayed on the screen.

Two months after the episode aired, in January 2006, Hayes admitted he was unhappy with it in an AV Club interview, but he defended Stone and Parker’s right to do what they did. "I understand what they’re doing," he said, laughing.

But when Hayes quit two months later, Stone didn't have any doubts about the reason. “This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology… He has no problem — and he’s cashed plenty of checks—with our show making fun of Christians,” the co-creator said that day.

Was Hayes really offended enough by the Scientology episode to quit such a lucrative gig that had revived his career in 1997?

A new wrinkle arrived in 2016, when Isaac's son Isaac Hayes III revealed in a Hollywood Reporter interview that in January 2006 his father had had a minor stroke, and it was his belief that someone else had written the March press release and had quit the show for him. Stone and Parker said they suspected as much.

Now, finally, there's stunning new evidence about what actually happened, and it suggests that there was a combination of factors at work: Hayes was deeply offended by the episode, and he agreed immediately with the highest levels of Scientology management to quit the show, but to wait some time in order to throw off the press for his reasons.

And when he did quit and issue that press release in March 13, 2006, it was using language very similar to what the church and a famous publicist had dreamed up immediately after the episode aired in November.

It’s all spelled out in a formerly secret Scientology memo, written on November 17, 2005—the day after the airing of the episode—by high-ranking executive Mike Rinder, who has since left the church and become a high profile critic of its practices, and sent to the Church of Scientology’s ruthless ultimate leader, David Miscavige.

“Yes, it was written by me,” Rinder tells the Daily Beast today as he helps decode some of the arcane acronyms at the top of the page showing who received copies of it, explaining that Miscavige was only one of several to get the memo. The others, Rinder says, were much less important. “He knew whoever else was on the list had no clue what to do about any external situation,” Rinder says.

And this was a whopper of an external situation.

“Re: South Park. Dear Sir, This program aired last night on Comedy Central. They did not contact the Church or give any forewarning on the show, not even to Isaac. The program is a total J&D of Scientology, Tom Cruise and John Travolta and contains upper level data,” Rinder wrote.

“J&D” is short for “joking & degrading,” a no-no in Scientology world, where everything is supposed to be focused on “clearing the planet” (AKA advancing the Scientology agenda to take over the world) and joking around is not tolerated. The South Park program had made fun of Scientology as well as its two most popular celebrities, Cruise and Travolta, and it had also ridiculed Scientology's secret “upper level data” namely, that at a certain point years into a Scientologist’s journey on the “Bridge to Total Freedom,” they are let in on the “OT 3” story of Xenu, a galactic warlord who had brought the victims of an interstellar genocide to Teegeeack, what Earth was known as 75 million years ago.

South Park had parodied this information with a graphic that read, “This is what Scientologists actually believe” and they were correct about that, as Rinder’s memo confirms.

He then focused on the person they believed was to blame for the fiasco, a journalist who had given Scientology trouble in the past: “We learned that Mark Ebner consulted on the program. (He also is listed as a contributing writer at Radar, and earlier picketed the church and did entheta [church speak for anti-Scientology] postings about Isaac Hayes calling Isaac a ‘house [N-word]’ and an ‘uncle Tom’ for selling out to Scientology.)”

Ebner was the author of a memorable 1996 Spy magazine feature, “Do You Want to Buy a Bridge?” that he had reported by actually joining Scientology for several weeks to get an inside taste of it. Since then, he had been a vocal critic of the organization, and had taken part in pickets. Ebner had also met Trey Parker and Matt Stone when he and co-author Andrew Breitbart interviewed them for their book Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon, which had come out that March.

But it was still a surprise, Ebner says, when a South Park producer asked him to come down to the Culver City studio where the animated series was made. Parker and Stone were there, along with the rest of the production crew, and they asked Ebner to talk about his experience reporting the Spy magazine article.

“I had my whole spiel,” he tells the Daily Beast. “All I did was recount what I went through for them while they audiotaped me. They were laughing. It was a really good time.”

He described Scientology’s controversies, and its infamous OT 3 story featuring the warlord Xenu, and the crew was taking notes. “I can only take credit for laying out what they then crafted into a masterpiece,” Ebner says. He wasn’t actually credited for his contribution to the episode because no one was. In a final joke at the end of the episode, everyone who worked on it was listed as either John or Jane Smith.

“I was asked, are you cool with that? I had a right to a credit, But I thought it was hilarious,” Ebner says. “It was a final fuck-you to Scientology.”

Ebner admits to having a low opinion of Isaac Hayes because of his Scientology involvement, but he says he doesn't remember ever using the N-word to describe him. “I certainly don’t remember typing that,” he says. “I never had any sympathy for him, but I wouldn’t have used the N-word.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the Church of Scientology, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and Isaac Hayes III for comment but did not receive any responses before publication time.

As for Isaac Hayes himself, Rinder's memo indicates that the singer had been “briefed on the show” that day, and that he was angry. “Isaac was briefed on the show when he arrived in LA at lunch time. He was very pissed and said it explained why he hadn’t been able to reach the creators of the show, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, over the last few days.”

Then comes the startling upshot of what Isaac Hayes had decided to do after his briefing: “He said he had had it with the show and is going to quit. This is not being done today so as not to create a media incident.”

The memo repeats this again, saying that Isaac Hayes had decided to leave South Park over the incident, but that he would delay making that announcement in order to throw off the press for the reason behind his decision.

It's not entirely clear from Rinder’s memo if the decision to quit was solely that of Hayes, or if he had been persuaded to take that step.

After announcing that Hayes intended to quit the show, Rinder described what else Hayes was doing about the episode.

“Isaac placed a call to Doug Herzog, the President of Comedy Central, to get them not to re-air the program. He left a message for Herzog who is on a plane enroute back to LA. He is going to tell him how pissed he is that they consulted with a racist, bigot Ebner, but not with him and if they had, he would have told them who Ebner is and what they were going to get into,” the memo says. “He then spoke to Matt Stone and Trey Parker. He briefed them on Ebner and both claimed that they did not like Ebner either and that he was working with one of their producers, trying to distance themselves from the show. They also told Isaac that they would not be doing any media on the show. Isaac plans to meet with them and Herzog tonight to handle them to pull the show so it doesn’t air or appear anywhere else.”

Ebner was surprised to hear that Hayes claimed that Parker and Stone didn’t like him. With a laugh, he said, “If they didn't like me, then I’d ask anyone to explain why I was continually invited to all of their holiday parties for years afterwards.”

Meanwhile, Rinder explained in the memo, they were dealing with CNN's plan to air a segment about the episode, with the network asking for a comment from the church. After speaking to Paul Bloch, the famous publicist at Rogers & Cowan, they decided not to respond to the CNN show. They also explored legal options, but Rinder indicated that two Scientology attorneys told them to forget about suing.

“A direct attack on the show would fuel the fire and a suit would be unlikely to succeed as they would defend it as ‘satire’ and the case would cause more interest and controversy than the original airing of the show, for little potential return (not to mention the cost),” he wrote.

Rinder added that after consulting with Bloch, they had come up with a statement for any other reporters who called: “Satire has a place in society, no matter how inaccurate and tasteless it may be. But satire is no longer funny when it is used to denigrate and make less of others because of color, creed or religion.”

“Paul thought this was a perfect response,” Rinder wrote.

The memo ends with a three-part plan to deal with the South Park episode going forward.

1. Isaac Hayes would “handle” Parker and Stone and Comedy Central's Herzog, to convince them never to re-air the episode. And Isaac would “third-party” Ebner “so badly Comedy Central never works with him again,” and convince Parker and Stone that they had been "sold a bill of goods" by working with such a “racist bigot.” (A key idea of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is the “Third Party Law,” that any conflict between two people is really being caused by a third party pitting them against each other.)

2. Scientology would also blame Ebner for the fiasco to other executives at Viacom, which owned Comedy Central. “Get the story circulating that Ebner wasn't honest and used the program for his personal vendetta.”

3. And finally, Rinder ended the memo by recommending to “get a new investigation done into Ebner and get his crimes found and exposed.”

Today, Rinder doesn’t remember if that investigation happened, but he assumes that it did. “Given the magnitude of this flap, I would be pretty certain it did. Whether it uncovered anything or not, I have no recollection.” Asked if he remembered being “third-partied” by Isaac Hayes, Ebner says he assumed it did happen.

“Would I be surprised that he was third-partying me?” he asks. “Of course he was. He was a Scientologist. This is their standard operating procedure.”

But whatever campaign there was against him wasn’t successful, Ebner says, pointing out that he continued to work with Comedy Central, appearing on The Daily Show, for example.

Ebner also notes that the episode came out around the 10th anniversary of the show, and was its highest-rated ever. The episode was nominated for an Emmy as “Best Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour),” and in 2009 was ranked #17 in TV Guide’s “TV’s Top 100 Episodes of All Time.”

In the 2016 interview published by The Hollywood Reporter, Hayes’ son, Isaac Hayes III, revealed that in January 2006 his father had experienced a minor stroke, and he believed that it wasn’t Isaac's decision to then quit the show in March, that he had been pushed to do it. Parker and Stone said they believed that as well.

Isaac Hayes III, Matt Stone and Trey Parker were all skeptical that Isaac would be so offended by what the show had to say about Scientology when he had never been offended by its shots at other religions. And Rinder tends to agree, calling that a “fair take” and lending credence to the idea that Isaac Hayes was pushed, and didn’t merely jump.

But asked if it might also be fair to say that his dedication as a Scientologist might have been more important to Hayes than being hip to satire about religion, Rinder replies, “Yes, that's also a fair take.”

When Isaac Hayes did put out his press release on March 13, 2006, the first sentence was a strong echo of the line that Rinder and publicist Paul Bloch had put together immediately after the episode aired in November:

“There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored. As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.”

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