Rumors have persisted for years that Will and Jada Smith are practicing, closeted Scientologists. This was sort-of confirmed by the bizarre hands-off parenting style Will kept touting during his interviews for the spectacular summer flop, After Earth. Will and Jada’s parenting is very similar to Scientology’s treatment of children as little adults. What’s more is that Will and his son, Jaden, spouted various philosophical bullsh*t during that press tour which sounded straight out of an L. Ron Hubbard manual. Plus we know that Will and Jada’s now defunct private school, The New Village Academy, used unproven Scientology teaching methods developed by the cult’s founder.

The first principal of the school, who was fired following her protests about the influence of Scientology, is speaking out. Jacqueline Olivier is an experienced educator who worked for New Village Academy for two years. She told cult expert Tony Ortega that she’s writing a tell all book about her experiences there, that the entire school was based on Scientology, and that staff worked to recruit parents into the cult. Olivier also dished some dirt about Will and Jada’s involvement in Scientology. She claims that Jada is really into it but that Will is a “dabbler.” Is this why they always seem to be splitting up?

For outsiders, Olivier says she quickly learned how to describe Study Tech in a way that made it sound harmless. “You could say, you just use the dictionary a lot, you use hands-on learning, and you don’t move up too fast. That’s what you tell people,” she says. At first, that’s how she figured it would be used at the school.

But after accepting the job from the Smiths, she learned more about the home-schooling operation they already had going at a house in Hidden Hills, California.

“I started finding out that everyone was a Scientologist, and what they were really up to,” she says.

At the Hidden Hills house, about ten children were being taught by ten parents. A one to one ratio? “Yes, it was one to one. And the house was just for the schooling. They weren’t living there,” Olivier says.

“All of them were Scientologists. They were doing ‘qual’ and ‘debugging’,” she says, using some Scientology jargon. “They were doing word clearing. There was ethics. All the teachers went over to the Hollywood Celebrity Centre every day for other courses.”

Besides the two children of the Smiths, Jaden and Willow, the others were the children of Smith family members or family workers. Most of them took Scientology courses.

And what about the Smiths themselves? We told Olivier that our own discussions with people who know the Smiths well led us to believe that Jada is an ardent Scientologist who has a serious fascination with the church’s “e-meter,” but that Will was more of a dabbler.

“If he isn’t one now, at least at that time he was, or seriously considering it. He was so into Study Technology,” Olivier says.

Will Smith was interested enough in Scientology, she says, that it concerned one of his closest advisers. As the 2007-2008 school year continued, Olivier says she was busy branding the new school and working out a lease for a building. In June 2008, Will Smith’s movie Hancock was opening, and Olivier says she was present when one of Smith’s partners talked to him about promoting the film.

“His business partner, James Lassiter, was telling him, ‘Don’t let Scientology get in the way of this movie. Don’t let the school and Scientology get in the way of the bottom line.’ I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the point of what he said,” Olivier says.

Tax records show that the Smiths made a payment of $1,235,000 from a family trust in order to finance the school. An unconfirmed press report claimed that about $900,000 of that went to pay for the three-year lease of a former high school in Calabasas. The New Village Leadership Academy opened its doors in the fall of 2008.

To prepare for it, Olivier hired a handful of non-Scientology teachers to go along with the ten Scientology teachers who had been running the home-schooling operation.

But before the non-Scientology teachers could go near the children, they had to get Scientology training, Olivier says. “You couldn’t interact with the kids until you’d taken a bunch of Scientology courses. And they were still supervised by the Scientology teachers to make sure they didn’t make any mistakes using Study Technology,” she says.

“They even wanted the parents to take Scientology courses. And they had a course room right on campus. With L. Ron Hubbard posters on the walls,” she adds. “The kids were taught all that stuff. That if you yawned, it meant you’d had a misunderstood word.”

What about the Smith children, Jaden and Willow?

“They only interacted with the Scientology teachers. They were in qual all the time.”

So they did more than just Study Tech? They were learning to become actual Scientologists?

“Oh, definitely. They were learning all the lingo. They had courses at the house.”

So Scientology, and not just Study Tech, constituted a heavy presence at the New Village Leadership Academy?

“It was the basis for the whole school. That was the overarching reason for it,” she says. “Will Smith would even say, ‘It has to be 100 percent in’,” she says, indicating Smith’s order that Scientology processes should be followed to the letter.

“I had this whole lineup of Scientology courses that I was required to take, and several of them were at the Celebrity Centre,” Olivier says. “They told me I had to be the expert on Study Tech, but what that really meant was that I had to keep taking Scientology course after Scientology course. It gets deeper and deeper, and at some point you wonder, what am I doing here?”

[From Tony Ortega via Radar Online]

There’s more at the source, including the detail that all the non-Scientology teachers were let go eventually.

Scientology is dead serious, horrible and soul-crushing for average people who end up sucked into it, but it does have some benefits for celebrity members, namely the slave labor of other cult members. Plus it has the appeal of superiority, Scientologists believe they can save the universe and that they’re the only ones who can do so. So I can see on some level why a naive celebrity like Tom Cruise or Will Smith would think it’s the answer. Here’s the thing though: it’s costing them money. Cruise’s reputation was ruined for years after he went off on glib Matt Lauer. Will Smith’s whole After Earth film was based on the Scientology scifi mythology, and that film cost him millions of dollars and may have tanked his son’s budding career. At some point, even though common sense “this is a sham cult” logic will never dawn on them, people like Will and Tom have got to realize that Scientology is affecting their bottom line. Isn’t that what it’s all about to them anyway?

I guess this explains why Will Smith never came out as a Scientologist. He believed in it enough to preach its ridiculous philosophies, start a school on it, and base a whole movie on it, but he’s consistently denied being a member of the cult.

Jada is shown with her new hair on 11-5. She’s also shown performing in August. The Smith family is shown at the After Earth premiere on 5-29-13. Will is also shown in December, 2012. Credit: WENN