Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux

My Testicle

It was late 2015. I’d recently completed a film about the mysterious and secretive and supposedly highly litigious religion of Scientology. But the film did not yet have a distributor. In order to drum up interest, we had shown it at the London Film Festival. I’d done my best to support the premiere by doing interviews, and writing articles, and sending tweets.

One evening, a message came in from Simon, the film’s producer. Something in his tone made me think it was ominous and I called back, after the kids’ supper, from the quiet retreat of our top-floor bedroom, to hear him explain that he’d had a letter from lawyers acting for the leader of Scientology, David Miscavige. He said: ‘Apparently you sent a tweet that they consider libellous and they are threatening legal action.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s not good, is it?’

‘No. Sorry.’ This was said in a manner so heartfelt and final that it suggested not just that the threat really was serious, but also that there wasn’t much he would be able to offer in the way of help. It was my Twitter account and if I was going to use it to libel vengeful high-profile figures, that was on me.

He ended by suggesting I call Nigel, the media lawyer who’d worked on the movie, which I did. He also forwarded me the letter. It quoted from a tweet – or rather a retweet, since the words had auto-generated when I’d clicked on a button to share an article – that said, and I quote, ‘David Miscavige is a terrorist.’ Yeah. That wasn’t good. I recalled tweeting the article – I’d had some misgivings on account of its overheated content and had wondered about erasing it, but a publicist we’d retained had suggested I didn’t, since apparently that was seen in PR circles as a sign of weakness and would probably only bring more attention. What I didn’t recall – and didn’t think I’d ever actually read – was the wording of the tweet itself. David Miscavige is a terrorist. I pondered all this a little ruefully, then called my agent. In a tone not dissimilar to Simon’s, she said, ‘David Miscavige may be a lot of things but he ain’t a terrorist.’

‘But what do I do?’

‘You need to get a good lawyer and get ready to spend a lot of money. Because I’m telling you now, this could be very expensive.’

A day or two later, another letter arrived from the lawyers acting for Miscavige, filled with more legal sabre-rattling and shield-clanking – ‘false’, ‘outrageous’, ‘defamatory’ – and a demand for an apology. This I might have thought about providing – given that I don’t actually think David Miscavige is a terrorist – except my lawyer warned that the apology would not forestall a claim of financial damages but, in fact, only make one more likely, possibly to the tune of £100,000 or more.

My lawyer advised me to instruct a high-powered QC. A name was suggested; Heather Rogers. She had once been part of the legal team defending the writer Deborah Lipstadt in her libel defence against the historian David Irving, whom she had labelled a Holocaust denier. There were meetings – the QC was as impressive as I’d expected – and, as she did her preparation, read the letters, read my tweets, the articles, and viewed the film, and as the bills came in and money haemorrhaged out, I found myself mainly reassured by her level of competence and only slightly distraught at the strangeness of having to pay someone hundreds of pounds to watch a film you’ve made, as research.

Around the same time, I was making trips up to MediaCity in Salford where I was appearing on a Christmas edition of the quiz show University Challenge. On the train, I would brood about my own stupidity at sending the tweet and the likelihood of it having catastrophic consequences. I looked up the meaning of ‘terrorist’. You could ‘terrorise’ someone without doing them physical harm, I reasoned. Though, as the Scientology letters pointed out, my tweet had gone out not long after the Charlie Hebdo murders, so I was sort of suggesting that David Miscavige went round stabbing journalists, which he hasn’t done as far as I know.

I did a Twitter inventory to see how many of my followers were real people. It suggested I’d only published the tweet to a million people, not 1.8 million. And in fact only a few thousand had probably seen it. I told this to Nigel, the lawyer.

‘Yes, I’m not sure how helpful that is for us,’ he said.

The case motivated me to do well on University Challenge. I was getting a small fee for each appearance. If my team went all the way, I’d only need another £98,000 for the war chest, though, come to think of it, that wasn’t counting legal fees.

In the final I got on a hot streak, answering questions on Mad Men, Tennyson and Pope Linus I. We won. It improved my frame of mind for about fifteen minutes. Another legal letter came in from Miscavige’s lawyers. We sent one back. Despite all the polysyllables and legal verbiage, it was, I realised, just a more sophisticated and more expensive version of two kids in a playground saying ‘Come on then! If you want some!’ ‘You and whose army! Hold me back! Hold me back!’ but neither of them really wanting to fight.

Still, it was stressful and not helping my equanimity was the sudden onset of a debilitating pain in the groin and, after ignoring it for a couple of days and then finally checking myself manually and in the mirror, the realisation that one of my testicles had grown to roughly four times its normal size. I racked my brain as to what the possible cause might be. Ice skating with my wife’s extended family in Tunbridge Wells? There had been a moment when I’d slipped. Possibly one under-knacker had clacked violently against the other, like Newton’s Balls, and the resulting force caused some kind of sprain? It was also true that I bicycled a lot to and from work. Presumably that causes some wear and tear on the undercarriage?

The aetiology was obscure but what couldn’t be denied was the constant throbbing pain.

I said to my wife Nancy: ‘One of my testicles is really swollen. Seriously. Look.’

‘Oh Jesus, stop it,’ she said.

It was by now a couple of days after Christmas and we had plans to stay with friends in Norfolk. But we agreed I should probably get the testicle checked out while she began the holiday with children. They drove off and I made my way down to an urgent health clinic in west London.

When I was seen, after forty-five minutes or so, the doctor was a young woman, who I had the vague impression might recognise me from television. I sighed inwardly.

I went into her office, or her surgery, or her examining room and, having collected myself, I said: ‘Something’s up with my testicles. The right one is swollen and painful.’

‘OK,’ she said, ‘we’d better take a look.’

My mind went back to a time years earlier when I’d noticed I had an uncharacteristically itchy bum and I’d gone to the doctor – a man I’d never seen before – and asked him to take a look, and I had the strong impression he thought I was doing it for some weird sexual thrill, especially since he couldn’t see anything wrong with my bum.

On this occasion, with the testicle, I thought, at least it’s visibly swollen. There is definitely something wrong.

I dropped my trousers, wishing I had worn a smarter pair of boxers. The doctor ran through the usual sorts of questions. Does it feel tender? When did you notice? Then felt it a little bit. ‘I’m not too sure,’ she said. ‘There are two possible things it might be. The thing is, one is pretty straightforward and I can prescribe antibiotics, but the other is more serious and in some cases even fatal. Now, it’s not likely to be that but I wouldn’t want to take any chances.’

She started making phone calls to various NHS personnel around London, specialising, I guess, in cobblers, and I could hear her being transferred from one department to another. She seemed to be going to a lot of trouble and the thought flashed through my mind that she was aware of the burden of being entrusted with the fate of the UK’s premier purveyor of presenter-led documentaries about American subcultures or, more specifically, the fate of his testicle.

This thought undoubtedly says more about my narcissism than anything real.

A little later, I was sent on my way to St Mary’s Paddington. The hospital was busy. There was a wait of several hours. When I was finally seen, I explained the situation, only to be told there had been a mistake: the relevant department was actually at Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith. Evidently there had been a mix-up during the transferring of phone calls and I had ended up at the wrong place.

By the time I arrived at Charing Cross Hospital it was dark. I’d spent close to five or six hours waiting and going between medical buildings.

This time I was seen quickly, though. It was a man.

‘Do you mind if I get one of my students in here?’ he said.

‘No, that’s fine.’

I dropped my trousers again and the doctor peered at my swollen ball as the student looked on.

‘Yep, I’ve got the picture. Orchitis. Infection of the testicle. Could be an accident. Could even be something you ate. Course of antibiotics should sort that out in a few days.’

Then he added: ‘I’ve got to say, I’m a big fan of your documentaries.’

That evening, I took the train to Norwich, where I joined Nancy and the boys, and the following morning I pushed the little one, Walter, in his pram around a hillside that overlooks the city, conscious of my testicle jostling in my trousers like a spiteful troll. The next night was New Year’s Eve. We visited my old friend Adam Buxton and his family at their converted farmhouse, staying up and toasting the year ahead, while I wondered inwardly whether I’d be remortgaging the house and should I just apologise or did that, as the lawyers claimed, lay me open to massive damages.

The next day we drove across to the eastern-most edge of Norfolk, to a little village called Sea Palling, whose buildings were mostly washed away in disastrous floods in 1953 that had killed seven people. Nancy and I and the boys whiled away the hours in an arcade filled with machines that cascaded two-penny pieces and spat out long snakes of tickets that you could trade for prizes and I tried to forget about the legal case.

After a few days of antibiotics, the testicle returned to its accustomed size, presumably a little wistful about its brief visit to the big leagues. And, by a strange quirk of fate, the Miscavige infection went down a few weeks later – finally succumbing to the weeks of high-dosage legal correspondence. Afterwards, along with the relief at the situation having gone away, I had the feeling of having been initiated, and that maybe this was the price of having been credited with more bravery than I deserved. Perhaps, on occasion, you had to weather misfortune that was undeserved – or at least, unglamorous, unexciting and ten times more worrying than an angry glistening wrestler with nipples like rivets or an exasperated Klansman caught out with Nazi figurines.

Other than occasional attempts to hack my emails, which may or may not have emanated from Scientology, or the News of the World, or a Russian troll farm, things went largely quiet.

And I’ve had no further issues with my balls.

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