© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2021, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX IR 23.2 (2020) 148–155 Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463-9955 https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.19164 Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743-1697 Keywords: Scientology, ex-member; memoirs, L. Ron Hubbard Apostate Memoirs and the Study of Scientology in the Twenty-First Century CAROLE M. CUSACK University of Sydney carole.cusack@sydney.edu.au Te Church of Scientology (CoS) under L. Ron Hubbard (1911- 1986) pursued an aggressive strategy of shutting down critics and protecting its reputation. Tis policy, known as ‘Fair Game’, resulted in limited scholarly engagement with Scientology, in part due to difculties in accessing reliable sources. From 2008 onward high- profle defectors published memoirs of their lives in CoS, multiplying source materials available to scholars. Tis article argues that these texts, which have been sidelined because of the hostility that the authors express towards CoS, are valid when carefully integrated into the fabric of available material on Scientology, which includes scholarly assessments, journalistic accounts, and a range of primary sources, of varying provenances. Introduction In more than six decades since Scientology’s origin in 1954 only four scholarly monographs have been published in English on this most con- troversial new religion (Wallis 1977; Whitehead 1987; Urban 2011; West- brook 2019). Prior to 2008, the Church of Scientology (CoS) sought to protect its intellectual property (religious texts authored by L. Ron Hub- bard) and defend its reputation via an aggressive strategy instigated by the founder, ‘Fair Game,’ in which critics were silenced by threatened or actual litigation (Cusack 2012, 304). Tis had an impact on both scholarly and popular research on Scientology. Yet 2008 proved a ‘hinge’ year, in that the Internet had become a repository of material about CoS, and tradi- tional law covering copyright, intellectual property, and the reproduction of embargoed material was largely irrelevant in the online context. Prior to 2008 one important ex-member book, Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky (1990) had appeared; its target was the reputation of Hubbard as a spir- itually advanced religious leader. Scholars triangulated information pro- vided by Atack with popular ‘tell-all’ biographies of Hubbard by Russell