Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (20 page)

I would love to hear from you and have a coffee with you!

Call me.

With Love,

Leah

XXX-XXX-XXXX

Once again, I received no response. I later received word back that my letter to her was considered “entheta,” meaning bad energy, sarcastic, angering, upsetting, and was basically thrown away. By this point Shelly had been missing for more than six years.

A few more weeks passed and I’d yet to hear any responses from the MAA about the requests for Knowledge Report withdrawals that Shane and I had submitted. I asked Shane about it, and he responded with “Let me check on it.”

When a request for withdrawal of a Knowledge Report is reviewed and accepted, formal paperwork and documentation accompany the agreed-upon withdrawal so that the parishioner knows the request has been granted. When I asked Shane to provide me with the formal paperwork, he instead forwarded an unofficial email from an MAA stating that the requests had been accepted. I knew this wasn’t on policy. I was getting the runaround. And now I was starting to get pissed.

I asked Shane for a full review of all of my accounting with the church as I had not yet received the $300,000 credit I had been promised. Shane in turn accused me of asking for a refund. I once again told him, “This is
not
a refund. This is a
credit
. A credit for all of the shit you guys have screwed up. When will you accept accountability?”

And with that, I received a personal call from none other than
COB, David Miscavige, asking if we could meet. I told him there was no point, but he insisted, offering to clear out the Celebrity Centre for me, Tom Cruise style. I declined but agreed to see him that night so I could confront this issue once and for all.

Angelo, who was worried, said, “Babe, do you want me to go with you?” I refused. The last thing I wanted COB to think was that I needed backup. I was after all, taller than David Miscavige.

David Miscavige, the leader of Scientology, greeted me. His longtime assistant Laurisse (whom I had seen with him at Tom and Katie’s wedding) was also there. He immediately told me he had been traveling and was not aware of what was going on with my situation.

I repeated everything I had already said to others many, many times, plus I went on to ask why wasn’t anyone seeing Tom Cruise the way I saw him? Why with his three failed marriages and couch-jumping antics was he considered to be the epitome of a great Scientologist? Why was he not treated as an SP who should be in session twenty-four hours a day? And why couldn’t I get an answer as to where David’s wife, Shelly, was? He told me that Shelly was okay and that he had to keep her away because SPs are constantly trying to have her subpoenaed. It was so out of left field that I didn’t know how to respond.

We talked a bit more, and all the while he continued saying he knew nothing about my problems but that he would look into things for me. I agreed to have him investigate further and get back to me.

I wasn’t sure that I believed his offer to look into things. So, frustrated with the constant runaround I was getting, I started making phone calls. I broke another one of the cardinal rules of Scientology and began reaching out to those who had been deemed Suppressive Persons. I knew I was yet again stepping outside the bounds of what was acceptable to my church, but given my recent experiences, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to these people, who had been very high up on the Org board, to make them give up everything and everyone in their lives.

I reached out to Mike Rinder, who had left the church in 2007.
I was honest with him that I wasn’t a big fan of his because of the way he had acted toward John Sweeney during the BBC documentary fiasco and a famous interview he gave to
Dateline
in which he blatantly lied to all of America when he said there was no policy of disconnection in Scientology. But for the man who was head of OSA for twenty-five years, a Sea Org member for forty years, and a Scientologist for fifty years to leave? Something must have happened to him. I listened to what he and another former top executive had said, that Scientology’s management—themselves included—was continually subjected to, and inflicted physical beatings on, other Sea Org members. I questioned him how this could possibly be. What about LRH policy?

“What you don’t understand is that we
were
backed up by policy,” Mike said to me.

I was stunned.

There were seemingly some secret flag orders and dispatches that Mike said he had seen that permit hitting and abusing people if it is in the course of getting someone to comply with policy, which would make it acceptable. According to several eyewitness accounts, in the Hole—a set of trailers on Gold Base (International Base), a remote 500-acre compound in Southern California—fallen executives are kept separated, humiliated, and often beaten. Mike said that at the direction of and by the hand of David Miscavige, leaders of my church, including Mike, were subjected to punishments like being made to lick bathroom floors or being doused in cold water, punishments that were so bad they felt they had no other choice but to flee. Mike decided enough was enough, choosing to leave the church and speak out; as a result he lost contact with his son, his daughter, and his wife of thirty-plus years, his mother and brother and sister and everyone else in his family.

My assumption up to this point—that terrible things like what was happening in the Hole were not an indictment of my church but bad Scientologists misusing policy—was wrong. Mike was saying that if David Miscavige was beating people, he wasn’t misguided; he
was following LRH policy—which is what all good Scientologists are taught to do. “That’s why at the time I thought it was okay,” he told me.

Of course, the Church of Scientology has always denied that any of this is true—the church says there is no Hole, no abuse, no beatings, at least not by David Miscaviage. But then why were so many former executives leaving Scientology and telling consistent stories of abuse?

I also reached out to Debbie Cook, the woman who was the captain of the Flag Service Organization (FSO), which meant she ran Flag, which she did for seventeen years. She had also been in the Hole, but she wouldn’t talk to me. The church was suing her for violation of a contract after the famous New Year’s Eve email that she wrote and disseminated on December 31, 2012. In it, she described herself as “dedicated to the technology of Dianetics and Scientology and the works of LRH…and I absolutely know it is worth fighting to keep it pure and unadulterated.” But she went on to say, “I do have some very serious concerns.” Those concerns could be summed up in two words: David Miscavige. “There never was supposed to be a ‘leader’ other than LRH,” she wrote.

The church charged that the email violated the terms of the agreement she made back in 2007 after spending seven weeks in the Hole. But as Debbie testified in court, after the abuse she experienced in the Hole, “I would have signed that I stabbed babies over and over again and loved it.”

Scientology made the mistake of suing Debbie Cook, and in a Texas courtroom under oath, she described her experience in the Hole, stating that she had watched David Miscavige punch people, and that for twelve hours she was made to stand in a trash can with a sign that read “Lesbo” hung around her neck. During this twelve-hour period, cold water was periodically poured over her head while people screamed at her to admit she was gay. (In
Dianetics,
LRH explicitly called homosexuality a “perversion.” Then later, he put being gay on the Tone Scale as “Covert Hostility,” which registers at
1.1 on the scale of human emotions, which is considered by Scientologists to be a person avoided at all costs.)

Reading Debbie’s email started me on an Internet search. In Scientology you are told to stay away from the Internet or other forms of media or intelligence that might be against Scientology. I broke away from this long-held rule and looked at hundreds of stories about my church and just sat there and cried. Not just for me, but for the many who believed in something that they thought was bigger than themselves and dedicated their whole lives to sustaining it. How could I have been blind to the stories that the rest of the world knew? Scientologists are hardworking, dedicated, and caring people, albeit misinformed people, and I was no exception. The reason for their blind faith lies in their core belief that they alone have the answers to eradicate the ills of humanity. You run back to the safety of the group that shares your mentality, and in this way your world becomes very insular.

During my crisis of faith I did what most people do in similar circumstances—I relied on my friends and family as a sounding board. But when I brought up my discoveries of abuse with John and Val Futris, my dear friends, former employer, and closest confidants for the last twenty-five years, I was surprised by the reaction my concerns elicited.

After confessing that I had read Debbie Cook’s email and tried to contact her, I asked them why no Scientologists would read it.

“Why would I read entheta?” Valerie said.

“How do you know that it’s entheta?” I asked.

“Because it’s from somebody who’s against our group.”

“It was somebody
in
our group, Valerie. And not just a somebody but a trusted member. Debbie Cook was the captain of the FSO, on the front lines of Scientology, for a very long time. Why wouldn’t you give her the time of day, to even look at what she has to say?”

Debbie and many of the others whose information and statements I was looking at were considered to be among the chiefs of our church. These weren’t just some ex-parishioners, bitter apostates,
kicked-out members, looking for fame or a quick payout. These were men and women who were respected leaders in our church, who dedicated their lives not only to our church but also to the Sea Org, signing billion-year contracts. They essentially gave up their lives for the church.

“Why would I go out of my way to read an enemy’s email?”

“It makes me wonder what you would do if
I
wrote an email like that.”

“I wouldn’t read it.”

“That kills me inside. I mean, you wouldn’t read an email from me? Are you kidding me, Val? You’ve known me since I was fucking sixteen.”

Once I opened myself up to the outside world, I heard so many terrible things. I learned what had happened to Sherry’s brother, Stefan, years after he came to me for help in getting his wife, Tanja, back from Gold Base, where she was kept for two years. At one point she was even put into isolation after she scaled an eight-foot wall topped by razor wire and jumped to freedom, only to be returned by Scientologists who found her walking along the highway.

Stefan never gave up on getting Tanja back. Eventually he came up with a plan that included sending her a Victoria’s Secret box, which he knew the security guards wouldn’t open because they wouldn’t want to risk being caught going through lingerie, which would certainly be considered aberrated behavior. In the box Tanja found a letter from Stefan and a cell phone so they could communicate. In 2006, seven years after they were first separated, Stefan pulled up at Gold Base in a car, and in the middle of the night Tanja jumped the wall again and the pair drove off to freedom.

Not long after I spoke to John and Val, Shane called me into the Celebrity Centre, but when I arrived at my course room, I found him standing with two men I had never heard of or met before. Shane introduced me. “This is Mike Sutter and Hansuli Stahli. They are executives from the church. They were sent here to talk to you.” The two of them, I later found out, were infamously referred to as David Miscavige’s “henchmen.”

“We wanted to sit down and answer any questions you might have,” they said.

“Great. Where’s Shelly?”

Rather than answer my question, they responded by showing me some policies they had on hand. I quickly dismissed them.

They then went on to say, “We got a report that you’re asking about Shelly and hooking up with the Debbie Cooks of the world.”

“Well, let me see the reports, because as per LRH policies you just showed me, I should have gotten a copy of the reports.”

“Well, it was a verbal report.”

“A verbal report? Why don’t you show me the LRH policy that says that’s okay? You can’t, because you know it’s not policy.”

They stared at me. I turned my attention to Shane.

“Shane, did you not know that I asked about Shelly? Did you not know that I was questioning what was going on?” Shane nodded that he did. “You’re all acting like I’m hiding something that I’ve been asking about for years. What the fuck kind of bullshit is this?”

Sutter and Stahli started in on a presentation of the expansion of Scientology and all the buildings the church had recently purchased. Pointing to images of millions of dollars’ worth of Scientology’s real estate holdings, Stahli said, “This is what we’re doing, Leah.”

“When you connect up with a Debbie Cook or a Mike Rinder,” Sutter said to me, “you’re cutting across the survival of mankind and impeding what we’re trying to do here.”

That’s right—according to Sutter, just talking with an SP means you’re trying to destroy Scientology by proxy. And if Scientology is humanity’s only hope for salvation, well, I was on the wrong side.

“Listen, guys, I really appreciate the eighth-grade presentation, but I could give a shit about buildings,” I said. “What I care about is myself, my family, and the people who are getting fucked by a church that doesn’t give a shit about the truth but rather buildings, which represent not only my millions of dollars but the millions of people who don’t have that kind of money but continue to remain dedicated and contribute.”

As I went on and on and on, it was clear they had no idea what to do. They weren’t prepared for this.

“I want answers as to why Tom Cruise seems to be running our church; I think he’s an SP. I want answers on why we have to spend hours and hours in session for minor transgressions, but you people, the embodiment of ethics and morals, don’t have to take responsibility for anything. I mean, what the fuck is going on here?…I want answers about Shelly Miscavige. So, do you have answers to where she is or anything else I’m asking about?”