Meet Spanky Taylor,
a drama queen whose nail-biting account
of a harrowing “escape” from the Church of Scientology
with her infant daughter in her arms
is the sensationalized centerpiece of Alex Gibney’s documentary…
even if the story was pure fiction.
Turns out Taylor is quite the backpedaler, too.
Because now that her fabricated yarn has been indelibly committed to film,
Spanky Taylor has a problem:
She has a former husband, attorney Norm Taylor,
who was there, an eyewitness to these same events.
It just so happened, she didn’t show up to work one day.
She just said 'I’m not doing this anymore'
and I talked to her . I said, "Hey, what are you doing,
just go in and follow the protocol and you’ll be off staff
and everything will be fine."
Which is exactly what she did. There was no escape involved at all.
Alex Gibney knew all about this interview with Spanky Taylor’s former husband,
but ran with her story, anyway…
In fact, Gibney refused to see Norm Taylor three months earlier
when Taylor came to New York to see him.
Instead, Gibney gave Spanky Taylor an unchallenged pass
because he had already cast her as the heroine of his video fantasy.
And so HBO sent Taylor out as a promotional mouthpiece.
Very ill-advisedly, as it happens,
because after being asked about just one of her stories,
Spanky Taylor immediately started backpedaling.
Your daughter was being, you say, mistreated.
Well, she, she was –
she had a very nice little girl who was taking care of her.
And then, things go from bad to worse
as the story of her great escape starts to unravel.
Now your ex-husband is on tape challenging what you say. Here he is:
As far as our daughter Vanessa, she was in the care
of a fulltime nanny and she had, she got everything she needed.
She was fed well, she was changed constantly,
I saw her every day. As her father I was there every day.
I used to take her out in her stroller, I took her for walks,
I would sing to her – I loved my daughter and I made darn sure
that she was well taken care of.
Would you say your ex-husband who is an attorney is lying there?
Um, I think from his perspective,
that’s how he remembers it.
That’s right - for Spanky Taylor,
now the truth is only what you care to remember,
not what actually happened.
And then awkwardly, and in a nervous panic,
Spanky Taylor blurts out just how long ago
this tall tale supposedly occurred.
I left many, many years ago. I mean, more than a decade.
I mean like, 30 years or more ago.
It was 37 years ago, to be precise.
In the 1970s.
Yet Alex Gibney dusts off Spanky Taylor
and, ignoring the testimony of her former husband,
presents her biased, distorted and discredited story
as if it were unshakeable truth,
even when Spanky Taylor herself backpedals from it.
Because Alex Gibney has a story of his own to tell.
“I think we got the story that we wanted.”
It’s not truth. It’s Alex Gibney. On HBO.