Julian Dorey Podcast - “Eyes Wide SHUT!” - Tom Cruise Scientology Auditing Partner on ESCAPING GULAG | The Headleys • 471

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

PREVIOUS EPISODE w/ HEADLEYS: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fLOd04BevjDHqAz84lVnI?si=StI8uu1XQZy5Y8uiHhmYlw SPONSORS: 1) ONESKIN: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code JULIAN at https://www.oneskin.co/JULIAN #oneskinpod 2) MARS MEN: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT NEWSLETTER: https://juliandoreypodcast.beehiiv.com/get-julians-top-10-books (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Claire and Marc Headley are authors, whistleblowers, and former high-ranking ministers who spent 15 years working at the Church of Scientology's secretive headquarters before executing a dramatic escape in 2005. HEADLEY'S LINKS: - BUY BOOK: https://blownforgood.com/ - INSTAGRAM: ​​https://www.instagram.com/blownforgood - X: https://x.com/blownforgood - YT: https://www.youtube.com/blownforgood FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Escaping Scientology, Ratting to the FBI 7:05 - Cadet Org, "It's Like Lord of the Flies" 20:02 - Scientology's Rule: "Attack, Attack, Attack" 28:54 - Hooked at Your Lowest Point 47:41 - Delphi Academy & Living Alone at 14 54:48 - Joining SeaOrg & Auditing With Tom Cruise 1:15:25 - Claire's Cadet Org Childhood in the UK 1:27:14 - "I Cried All the Time" 1:41:44 - Interrogating Adults at Age 15 1:52:38 - "He Asked Me to Marry Him After a Week" 2:01:52 - Married in Three Months, Sent to Denmark 2:06:00 - Forced Abortions Inside SeaOrg 2:20:00 - January 2005: Planning the Escape 2:29:06 - The Motorcycle Escape & the Chase 2:42:48 - Rebuilding His Dad's Computer Business 2:56:53 - Plotting Claire's Breakout Alone 3:12:04 - Reunited in Kansas City 3:19:05 - Building a Marriage From Shared Trauma 3:32:27 - Scientology Weaponized Their Own Families 3:52:20 - The Headley's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 471 - Claire and Marc Headley Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right. So you and I were just talking off air about the stuff we finished the last episode with and didn't really get to, which is the whole alleged CIA slash FBI involvement in Scientology. Did you guys ever hear any whispers about that while you were in there? Did you even know what the CIA was? Yeah, we knew. I watched a movie here and there before I got it to sign up. All right. But the FBI and the CIA were the bad guys. to us. Oh, you were taught, they were very bad. Well, yeah, because- Well, we might agree on that. Yeah.

Well, Hubbard wrote a lot about the US government and how they're tried to destroy Scientology in the early years. And so there's a lot of folklore built into Scientology that the government is bad. Politicians are backstabbers. Right about that. Yeah. Psychiatry, psychology. American Medical Association.

These are sort of like Scientology is threatening their business model. And that's why they're talking about Scientology being a bad thing is because Scientology is threatening their bottom line. And so you sort of

that's that is sort of the view that you have when you're in it. And then when we came out and then we and I was posting on the internet in 2000, late 2005, early 2006, I started posting on the internet. When you, when you escape from Scientology, it's called a blow. And someone who has escaped, it's meant they're,

they have blown Scientology. And most of the time, they try to recover those people and bring them back into Scientology. And they call that being recovered. And so when I started posting on the internet, I wanted to make sure that they knew that I was blown for good. I'm never. coming back. And so I had probably over a million views and hits on the things that I had written on different blogs and stuff about Scientology. And in that period, I guess that the FBI started seeing some of this stuff and putting the picture together. And so when we were contacted by these two agents, it was sort of like the what? You want us to become confidential informants against Scientology? And there was a part where when we were, this is all old news now, but we were being

shown drone footage of the property of the Scientology headquarters by the FBI and being asked, what's going on here? Why are these people migrating over to this place and who and even? We were actually going to accompany them to raid their headquarters. So we could say this is where this is, this is where that is, like basically provide them, in my book, there is a map of the property and a key that shows what every single, this is where David Muscovage lives, this is Elvon Hubbard's mansion, this is where religious technology center offices are, and it lays out the whole property. Well, they were like, when we go there, we want you to show us where David, all the transcript,

Every meeting that David Miskavage holds, no matter with who or where, is recorded and transcribed. Every single meeting. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. And they filter out all the beatings and the cursing and all that stuff. But everything else is pretty much in these meetings.

And obviously in the original recording, that's on the original. recordings but so they were like we want you to take us to these show us where these things are show us where they have a cache of files or wherever digital things were and in my case because i was i was a a technology guy when i was in scientology and the seorg i ran and connected that entire 500 acre property with fiber to all the different buildings and set up all their networks and everything like that so when I left and then started posting these things on the internet about what was going on at the property, even after I left, because people were escaping and then giving me four little facts

about this happened. And then another person would escape and we'd help them get a job or whatever. And they'd be like, oh, this happened and that happened. So I was constantly updating with new things. Yeah. And between our shared knowledge of things, we were able to put together the pieces of a lot of more current information of what was happening. But then I heard from somebody who escaped that they thought that I had installed different devices on their networks so that I could still access things that were happening. It speaks to their level of paranoia more than anything. Yeah. Yeah.

So they even, did you? Well, I'll tell you this. They were going through my garbage when we lived in Burbank and they found a receipt for a wireless video transmitter device that could be plugged in. into like a VGA port and then that would be sent via radio waves and you could have a receiver and you could see what was ever on that screen. They found that receipt in our garbage and they put the pieces together that maybe I had somehow installed this at the property somehow and that's how the funny thing was is my business. I have a tech, AV tech business right now and it was for a display for a company that fabricated custom furniture and scenic and did like universal city,

universal rides and stuff like that. And we had this interactive where you would move this target around this giant board. And if you went restaurants, it would, on this on this display, it would show all the restaurants they built. It was a Catalina Island kiosk. Yeah. But, but it, that's what that device was for. But they had put this whole thing together. that I was doing all this other stuff. And I was like, no, bitches, I'm just getting info from people that recently escaped. I don't, I'm not there, modern. I'm not camped outside your property.

This is a really good cover story. Yeah, I almost believe you. It is. It's pretty good. But yes. But we, it was weird when that happened. Oh, that's Claire right there. Yep.

That's, that picture is Claire. Oh, that's you in uniform. Yeah, she is. That's me and the cadet organization. Yeah. The big one in the front road. Right there. And then that's you really little right there.

No, no. Where? On the right? Is that you? No, no. That's Valesca. Oh. The one that's doing the salute.

No, no, no. The salute over there, that's not you. No. But this is you in the kids picture, right? Yeah, yeah. From Tony. That's in UK. That's in that place where she said.

That is me at six years old in the cadet organization. And you're smiling. too. Right. You know, sometimes they feel like stupid questions to ask, but like I can't really put myself there without asking them. Do you know, do you understand at that age? Because you're in the process of being very actively brainwashed at six. Do you understand emotion? Like a picture's being taken. You're supposed to smile and you're supposed to feel something like happy because you're being taking a picture? Feelings don't matter in Scientology. It's just smile. But do you know what that is? You know what I mean?

That's a vague question. So, funny story about this picture in our deposition, in our lawsuit, Mark Marmaro, the guy that we looked at, was doing the deposition. He showed me this picture and said, did you have a happy childhood? I said, no. Absolutely not. The emotions that I remember at this age were constantly battling to try and spend any amount of time with my mom. if I saw her an hour once a week or two hours, that was a good week.

So, you know, you're right. I was already in so in deep that even at this age, I knew that if I didn't comply and do what was asked to me, I'd lose my mom. Yeah. Now, when Jenna Miscavage was on my show, she described these schools of which you were both apart. We'll get to that. But, you know, she described the teachers in them as like, Like the way I was picturing it was, again, to use the Truman Show example, where they talk to you in that fake voice where they're like, you're going to do this right now because that's what we do. And she was like, no, that's literally what it was.

Yeah. Would you say the same? 100%. And in fact, most of the people that are in charge of the children at this time, they don't allow, there is no, they don't do that anymore. They got, there was way too much scrutiny on the children and how they were being educated and unsupervised. for the most part, all of these kids were on their own and their boss. If you're six, your boss was a 12-year-old or a 10-year-old. It's the cadet.

The state's organization. The kids make up the organization. They have posts and positions and they have to report their statistics. And it's basically like a baby C-org for kids. Yeah. And like this, around this age is when I was made. to sign my first billion year contract. At six?

Mm-hmm. It was a requirement. To be in the cadet org, you have to be like, I'm gonna eventually become a C-org member. You're being groomed and trained for service in the C organization. And because it's under a religious designation, they say you actually agree to it and like it,

which is fucking crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And the crazy, the other crazy thing, and this is coming up more recently, is that not only did they have the cadet org back then, but they also had a lot of Scientology schools. So there was a thing where Scientologists, wealthy or just regular Scientologists,

are having to send their kids to non-Scientology schools, which Hubbard frowns upon. So they started making these Scientology schools. And in many cases, those kids don't even end up graduating from the Scientology school because they get scooped up for the Seahork when they're 50s. or 16. And even in that picture, that one random picture in England, there's three or four people in that picture that ended up working at the international headquarters with us. So the kids, if they're gotten in early enough, they become senior C-org members as they grow up because

they don't know anything else besides the C-organization. Wow. So they're, and they also, So they didn't get to do drugs. They didn't get to get into any kind of criminal activities or nonsense because they've been living in the bubble the whole time. Right. And they're the best and most dedicated Seward members because that's all they know. And you had that picture of the operation that the government did up on there, Project Normandy. Yeah. Or where was the one where they went to jail?

I think that's the other one. Okay. Yeah. The, I think that one. Yeah. There you go. So that's the list of the people in the Guardian's office. This is when the wife went to jail.

That's the wife went to jail. But the only reason I bring that up is because there's a name on there, Henning Helt. Yep, right there. He was the dean of the Scientology School I went to. He was the dean right after he got out of prison. He was in the Guardian's office, got busted, went to jail, got out, and was the head of a Scientology school. It's like the mob. You leave college and they're like, we set you up with a new fucking business.

Yeah. And many of the people, like the Willardsons, there's another guy on there, Greg Euler-Willerson. His mother worked at the school. He was a guardian's operative. Now, why were they nice to people like Henning and Willerson and all that? But he wrote off his own wife. Because they disappeared her. Because they knew stuff and they could leak stuff.

Hubbard's wife was banished but taken care of. So she had a full time she lived in I think I want to say Los Felis. Yeah, she was put in a house. She had Seorg members. Basically were her caretakers. Yeah, I can't remember the guy's name. Neville Potter. Neville Potter was her full-time caretaker, but she was not allowed to interact with anyone in Scientology from that point forward.

Except for her character. And she was removed from all the pictures. She was literally written out of Scientology's history. You've probably heard us talk before about One Skin for their best-selling skin care. But now they're bringing that same breakthrough longevity science to their scalp serum, OS1 hair. Now, for all the guys out there listening, you know, as we get older, we start wondering when that hair line's going to start going.

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That link is in my description below. That's 15% off at Oneskin.co using code Julian. After you purchased, they're gonna ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. Yeah. Wow. So, but that's how wild. But kept on control.

Because she could have, if she turned, she would have exposed that El Ron Hubbard knew all about the illegal things and they were just doing his orders. I just think about like what you were saying earlier. were saying earlier about the genesis of all this time when L. Ron Hubbard comes up with the idea of Scientology. You made a great point that it's like during the nuclear scare era of the 1950s and 60s where people are like, the world could end tomorrow so he can get people, even smart people to be like, you know what, this seems like the thing as crazy as it sounds. But, you know, what kind of control do you have to have to be able to take like a totally

you know unsuccessful guy El Ron Hubbert was not a successful writer his writer he wrote a lot but he it was shitty stuff you know and just create this whole thing without there being something bigger at play and what I'm getting at

is this same era of like doom and destruction dawn of the Cold War is when you have all these crazy CIA conspiracies going on like MK Ultra them trying to do all kinds of shit to people to work on mind control basically. It would make sense to me that you would try to make some sort of organization that's under your umbrella, meaning in the

United States, obviously they operated globally, but it's a guy who's from the United States creating it who could also move it globally, where you get some assets in other places, and try to experiment with how much you could use natural tendencies to control people, meaning not necessarily putting something LSD in your drink and trying to figure out if then you listen to them. Yeah. But like if you actually do a long-term brainwashing of people. Yeah. Could you get them under your thumb?

And then maybe there's, I don't know. And now it gets a 12D chest. They use that for something moving forward. Could you see that being a possibility for the genesis of this? Well, Hubbard in the early days before 1950s, Hubbard was involved with Alistair Crawley. Yep. he was also dabbling in hypnotism and all of these different things and he also from i think if you read is it russell miller yeah russell um yeah russell miller bare-faced messiah is a really good book

that's documents and exposes the fraud of elrone hubbard for the entire span of his life literally like every single thing that I thought I knew about Elron Hubbard is documented as false in that book. Yeah. And there's a lot of folklore in there. But Hubbard wrote a lot about what they call it in Scientology PDAHing, which is pain drug hypnosis. So you torture somebody and drug them and you hypnotize them. And then they do. That's like Manchurian candidate kind of shit.

Yeah. And I think people think that if the, because of the way Scientology operates, there must be some CIA or FBI or some kind of government intel connection there. I think it is, Hubbard was like, no, no, I learned about that, but I want it for me. I don't want to be the tool of them.

I'm gonna be the guy who perfects this. And you talk about those programs where they're drugging people and they're doing all these things. And they have all these like remote viewing guys that they're doing projects with and stuff. In Scientology, they have this thing called exteriorizing where you can basically leave your body and be anywhere and see what's going on. That's a real thing in Scientology. Well, it's a complete bullshit.

But it's a real thing that they teach you that you could do. And if you have some sort of fever dream that matches that, you're like, fucking A, I'm leveling up in here. They have a, in one of their magazines called the Advance Mag, they have advanced. they have advanced magazine they have o t phenomena stories where o t phenomenon so operating thayton that's what the person who knows about lord zinu and the body thayton's all they do all the things to get rid of all those body thadens once you get rid of all those body thayton's and you go all the way to the top of scientology you basically become uncumbered unencumbered by all these aliens and you become a god and that's when you can you know i'm gonna zip over to florida

Many Fonomeno stories are like, oh, and I was driving down the highway and I perceived that there was going to be an accident and I moved out of the way. Yeah, that is another, that is another crazy thing about operating fate and phenomena. I want to say over the last 20 years where they've been posting these stories, they mostly involve vehicles not getting in accidents or finding a really good parking spot that I never would have been. Those are like... I can think of some things on the list I'd want to put above them. Yeah. Those are the most common stories. Like, then the car verbed in front of me.

And for some reason, I just turned the wheel a second earlier. It's because I perceived that there was going to be an accident. You got to be like, you know, I exteriorized and I saw the vehicle that I couldn't see inside the car, but I could see it from above the traffic. You know, like these are the, these are real stories that they put in these magazines. It's like a three-eyed raven basically in real life. Yeah. And so they're like, that's kind of the sales pitch you get. If you're a Scientologist, like, well, you know, you want to become OT.

All of these, whatever, if you're getting sick or your wife's ragging on you or whatever, that all gets sorted out when you get on the OT levels. Because you're not effect of the fucking alien chimney crickets that are talking to you to do shit. shit and you can just be you. And so I don't think, I legitimately do not think that the government is in bed with them. Do they have people in government that kind of look the other way or they've got they've got one of their lawyers or attorneys or big wigs donors that maybe plays golf with the the Department of Justice guy that can maybe make this thing go away, that 100%'s going on. I mean, currently, some of the major donors to Scientology, a couple of them happen to also be major donors to the current administration. So they have, I mean, Tony Ortega has covered this a lot over the years, but it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter who's in office. They've got people there. Right. So they're not playing the side of this administration or that administration. They're playing the side of the current administration. So, and they, and they're in it for the long game. So no doubt about that. If there's a project that this could, this guy could eventually blossom into something that's an asset to us, we're going to kind of keep tabs on him and keep him happy. and invite him to all the things and do the this and that's and they'll do that it's well documented that in clear water when they were having major issues in clear water with the local town and the police and the government what years are we talking approximately in the 90s and the 2000s there was a woman who died at one of their facilities lisa McPherson and there was a lot of things going on

and they were under heavy heavy scrutiny and you have an event you invite all the local politicians and John Travolta dances with their wives, you know, just like, oh, the mayor's here. Oh, hey, Mrs. Mayor, you want to dance with me real quick? And that, that, I mean, your wife danced with John Travolta. You got, you grew up watching him in Saturday night fever and welcome and caught it. And now, it's no accident. Scientology went into the event knowing to invite the wife who is a big fan of whether it be Tom Cruise or John Travolta, it's all planned and very intentionally carried out. Very good spy games.

Yeah, they know how to play the games. The only thing where they kind of fall down in Scientology is that they document everything. There's a paper trail for everything. But physically, or is it also digitally? Physically and digitally. And even to the point of those counseling sessions that you do, those are recorded on video with audio.

That's crazy. So if you, and a lot of Scientology counseling is sort of like get you out of your head and like kind of look at the world from a different view. The other half is interrogation. It's what did you do? What are your overts? What are your withholds? What are your missed withholds? And you could be confessing to very highly sensitive things that you did in your personal life.

and those are being recorded and stored on a central database where they go. And then they kind of, they categorize it as well. So they, that wasn't really a problem for us when we went to leave because we grew up in Scientology. So it wasn't like they had like, oh, this guy robbed the bank and nobody found out about it in 1977. seven, because I grew up there. But people that are in Scientology that aren't in the C-org, and they've been up to nonsense, and then they unburdened themselves with that to feel better. And then Scientology is like, okay, we'll put that down.

And so sometimes you see when people escape Scientology, Scientology is like, this guy was a criminal, this guy did this, this guy did that, and they talk mad shit about that person. But we grew up there. So when they did that to us, I was like, what do you mean? I was a Scientologist my whole life. So you're saying I progressively became more and more criminal in Scientology? How did I become the big bad guy if I worked for you the whole goddamn time? Yeah, it's like, come on, guys.

But that's what they do. Everything is just to whatever their advantage is to hold power over you and claim they have leverage. Yeah. And Hubbard laid out in his sort of the operations manual for the office. office of special affairs and then the guardian's office, you never, never defend. There's no defense. It's attack, attack, attack. We always attack, never defend. And so... In Hubbard's words, he said to destroy utterly silence and a few other choice terms of anyone who criticizes Scientology. Dave, can you find the three tenants of, I guess, like, PR, whatever the term was, that Roy Cohn believed in, the famous attorney.

Are you familiar with Roy Cohn? No. So he was a famous New York City attorney, a fixer attached to a lot of very shady stuff in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Eventually, he died. He actually died of HIV because he was like closeted. gay his whole life and there was a movie I think where Al Pacino played him but Rick Cohn actually even was a guy who advised a young Donald Trump legally in the 70s of New York but he had three rules of winning and rule number one was attack attack attack yeah rule number two was

admit nothing admit nothing deny everything rule number three is no matter what happens you claim victory and never admit defeat that's you know that's it hashtag Iran but you know hashtag Scientology Hashtag David Miscavage. Hashtag David Muscavich. I'm hearing exactly the same things. Yes. And that was a tenant.

Exactly. Yeah. So that's, and that's the other kind of crazy thing about Scientology is there, the way Elrond Hubbard laid it out is that he was what they called source. He's the source of all of the information. And they, whenever they think somebody, they sometimes say, and I think source for everything, they call him source. And so, but in his policies, he said, you can never change what I've written. That can never, ever be changed. It's a policy that says, this policy says, although the policies can never change.

Well, David Miscavage has been kind of massaging and sort of tweaking things to make it more for what he wants. Yeah. But for the most part, most of the nastiness that happens in Scientology. is per a Scientology policy that they are to do that. So when they go into these cases and they say, oh, we don't do that, it's almost like, well, here's a policy letter that says

that's exactly what you do, and you, and here's the policy letter that says, you can't change doing that. So with the advent of the internet, more and more and more of these stories are coming out and that the policies are being exposed and built into Scientology's failsafe is they can never not do that.

that right so they're kind of stuck where they can't they can't be like a modern day cult and say okay hey when we do this with the women people get really out of sorts so we're going to stop doing that they don't they don't have that in scientology and they can't be a nice cult they can't be that that that's another thing is some some cults you have the regular version of that like the vanilla version of that and then you have the extremist version yes There is only the extremist version of Scientology. There is no vanilla part of it. It is, Tom Cruise has in that turtle, turn on like video, you're either with us or you're not.

You're either on the field playing the game or you're in the stands and you don't have anything to do it. Here's where they play the magic trick on society, though, where it can look differently, because I believe you. I mean, you were in it. But the people who are in, say, the C-org or what was the top thing called again? The in-base. The in-base and places, it-based, places like that, you guys, you know, you're born onto the actual commune, if you will, and everything. And you're inside it and you're separated from reality. But then people who are at, you know, the lower levels just out in society, they live in the real world a lot of the time.

And then just come in and do some audits and stuff like that. So could you see how from the outside people who aren't in it, we look at it and we're like, well, isn't that? isn't like the way Gena Miscavich grew up kind of different than how, you know, Tom Cruise, not Tom Cruise, but, you know, some other random celebrity just who joined Scientology when they were 25 operates while they still operate as a real person. You see what I'm saying there? Yeah, absolutely. I think in Scientology, they sort of, they sort of capture you as an individual when you're at a low point. That's what they use the low point to get. you in and they say, you know, you're having problems with drugs. We have a drug rehabilitation program you can do. And you get all those drugs out of your body. And then you don't have the drugs are what are making you want to do more drugs. So if you can get rid of all those drugs, then maybe you don't want to do drugs anymore. But then they tell you about all these other things you got to do. And you think you're doing good. And you think I'm helping people get off

drugs, I'm helping do this, I'm helping people learn, like, become more aware of how life works and stuff like that. So they truly, most Scientologists are not evil people. They're people that were vulnerable and they were convinced that this is this path to become less vulnerable and be more kind of in the driver's seat of your life. And then they kind of find, as they find out more and more, they're like, mm-and-and-now it's this sunk-cost thing, like... Sunk-cost fallacy, yep. I've been in here 20 years, my kids... Throwing good money after bed.

Yeah, and now you're like... And your partner, your kids, your friends, you're who you work for, you're too... close to the center of the web by that point to easily extract yourself. You've heard me talk about my dad and the wall he hit in his 50s with his testosterone. He was doing the same workouts, eating the same stuff, but his recovery was terrible and his energy was down, which is why he started taking Mars Men.

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That's men go to mars.com, link in my description below, for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I saying you. Yeah, and I think when those people kind of feel like, I'm getting the ick a little from Scientology now, and they're also messing with you at the same time. Yes.

Like, hey, you haven't been into the organization in a few years. Why aren't you here? What's up with that? In Scientology, if you're not continually doing Scientology, then that's called a bad indicator. Yeah. So I remember, I remember Leah talking about this, like where they would like call her in and she'd have to spend a month there.

It's been a while, but yeah, when she was on Joe Rogan like a decade ago. Yeah, exactly. They would be like, no, no, no, you're fucking up. So you gotta come do this. Like, how do you just pull them out of the world and now they, but I get it because you're in it. Yeah. And you risk losing your livelihood or your family.

if you don't play the game. Yeah. So I think those people, when the Danny Masterson thing comes out and they found out, not only did he do all these things, Scientology knew about it from day one. They knew it was a problem before some of these other victims came out. Like there's, the Danny Masterson thing is a crazy example, but the people that came forward are just the bravest of the people that were victims. There were many other things that happened.

And those people either sign something or they got a check or, you know, they made that problem disappear. But when that is happening and then he gets convicted and they're still trying to help him out. Scientology to this day are still trying to organize his other lawsuits so that they come out and good in the end. And I think that is the Scientologist. So like, I can't. I can't. Yeah. Whatever happens to me happens, but I can't be on the same team as these guys. I'm on the wrong side of this if these guys are sticking up for this guy.

Yeah. Whether it's Scientology or insert cult idea here, not even a full-blown cult, but just like some idea, one of the things I really keep myself self-aware on and I encourage people around me to is to never think you're above that or that couldn't happen to you. It doesn't matter if your IQ is 40 million. You know, everyone has some sort of vulnerable time or vulnerable point where if the right manipulative tactics are used on them, they can agree to things that maybe later they start to question, but now they're in so deep that they're brainwashed and they can't get out of it. So like, especially when I talk with people like you who were brave enough to escape, it's not like, well, you went from being stupid to smart. It's not bad.

It's like you had to re and we'll get to this with the actual specifics of it, but you had to rewire everything. that you had been programmed to believe and create that new software yourself. Yep. Yeah. We were running on a bad OS. Right. You were on that Linux shit. Yeah.

You know, on that old school shit. Yeah. I would say cobal, but... It's a lot, but you're right. It's a lot to walk that back. Yes. It is a lot and it's still ongoing, but, you know, again, when you're from age four, in my case, in the very heart of it, it is almost overwhelming how much you have to kind of rethink.

Like, well, wait a minute. Am I thinking this because that's the reality? Or am I thinking this because that's what they taught me to believe? And even down to our marriage, like for the entire time we were in the C organization, they drilled into us over and over and over again. The people that leave, they end up as drug addicts or prostitutes. and they'll be flipping burgers the rest of their lives and their marriages fall apart.

Yeah, fear, fear tactics, 100% so much so that, you know, I had, after we left, like, shortly after, I was like all worried about it. And Mark was like, why? You're just granting that power to them. It's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah.

They rely on you doing most of the heavy lifting. in to stay and all the all that nonsense that's going on they rely on we've programmed you good enough you're not going anywhere and if you do there's enough things in place around you in your scientology environment that'll knock you back onto the right track whether it's your family or your boss that's a Scientologist somebody sees something going sideways with you they'll make hey dude you the everything's on the line here if you if you don't do this if you don't stay in Scientology, your life's over. I saw a video the other day of someone, there was an ant on a paper and someone kept drawing a line in the direction where the ant went and kept making it smaller and

smaller. And the ant would see, you know, it's a line, he could easily step over, but he thinks the ant thinks it's an actual wall. And it would change directions every time to go in the direction that the guy drew the latest line and eventually was totally locked in. And I think that that's kind of a perfect visual of what you're saying, where they're just drawing the lines and you're the one that's like, oh, shit, all right, that's a wall. 100%. And so when you realize that you have all of the cards,

they have no cards, then the whole thing falls apart. And you just have to say like, okay, I'm not going to do it. Screw it. What are you going to do? In our case, in my case specifically, I didn't see my mom for 15 years, when I worked at that property. So she didn't work at the same property as I did.

She was in Scientology in L.A. or Clearwater. And I'm in Scientology in the middle of desert in California. So for me, for them to say, well, you're never going to see your mom again. It's like, bitch, I ain't seen her in 15 years. I've seen her three times in 15 years. And I wasn't a big fan of hers when I was a kid because she was shoving all the Scientology shit down my throat. So that ain't, I'm, you know, it's.

It sucks. It sucks. I haven't seen my mom in 20-something years or whatever. I saw her once at a funeral. And we went to another family event and she said she couldn't come or she couldn't be there. And they said, why? And her family are not in Scientology. None of her family. She has nine brothers and sisters, none of them in Scientology. So weird. So she said, they said to her. We were at the event. No, Mark wasn't there. I was there with his dad, though. It was a barbecue in, you know, Kansas City, just on her phone. like we're sitting sitting around chatting on her farm on my grandmother his grandmother's okay his mom goes inside under the guise of oh i'm going to go get something and refuse to come back outside and bernie mark's dad went in to say hey what's going on you just vanish she's like i can't talk to them my entire no the future eternity of all mankind is threatened if i talk to them is is your father inside my father's not my father's not my father wasn't my father my mother okay when we when i was six we moved from kansas city to l a my dad was going to make it big in a rock band he was a bass player and his band the guys that were in

his band with him in kansas city one of them had moved to l a and was hooking up with some music producers and stuff and it's like dude you got to get out here we can we can we're going to be we're going to be a big band. And so we moved to LA from Kansas City. We lived in a house, a single family house in Kansas City. When we moved to California, we lived in a studio apartment. That was cost more than our house in Kansas City. The guy that was in my dad's band who got him to come out was a Scientologist. That guy tried to get my mom and dad into Scientology. My dad said, see you don't want to be you and my mom said sign me up and they got they split up because he said I'm this is crazy they divorced they divorced and my mom went whole hog on Scientology now why did she

do that what what drew her to it I think she was a go-getter she grew up on a farm so there was a lot of working she was a hard worker they had to work they were my grandparents own tobacco So they were making cigarettes, basically. They were making tobacco for cigarettes. And she was one of nine kids. She was one of nine kids. And I think she was just like small town in the middle, grew up on a farm in the middle of nothing.

Now you drop her into Hollywood, and we're living across the street from the Celebrity Center. And this guy's like, oh yeah, we got Chick Korea. We got these guy, we got all these guys. And it's like, ooh, ah, shi-oh. shiny things. I don't really know, actually. I never even really thought about what, what did they use to get her in? But the fact that my dad was like, nope, I'm not doing it. But he didn't talk shit about Scientology. He just didn't want to be in it. So they split up. But I was still allowed to go

hang out with my, live with my dad or live with my mom. And, you know, we'd switch back. My sister and I would switch back and forth. But my dad was like, he knew early on, if I did. talk shit, I'm never going to see these kids again. Yeah. Side comment. But to me, that is a big part of the difference in perspective that Mark and I had growing up in Scientology. For me, my only caregiver was all in and it just, you know, there was nothing else.

Right. But Bernie being on the outside, I don't know. I just think that accounts for some of the rebel streak and Mark honestly. Well, I could kind of, when I live with my mom, it was Scientology, Scientology, Scientology. And Alwyn Hubbard wrote all these volumes and volumes of Scientology policies. And there's green ones, which are for the organization. And then there's red ones that are for the technical, like the how to do the counseling and how to do the training. And there's probably in all, there's probably hundreds and hundreds of these things.

I mean, the dude just spewed bullshit. Oh, he wrote a lot. Just diarrhea of the type. There was no drafting. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Rip it and roll, maybe. Exactly.

Someone told us a few years ago there's actually a psychological condition known as too much literary output. And we're like, oh yeah, that's a real thing. It's like Raffia something rather. They just have to just jam it out no matter what's happening. Anyway, whenever I get in trouble or anything, my mom would go, okay, we need to have a little talk. And then she'd pull out the Scientology books and find the Elron Hubbard policy for from 1962 that has to do about the situation that I'm in right now. And so I could...

Well, this one's the cane. Yeah. The reason you make that fuck, or. Anyway, so if I could escape that on the weekend and go hang out with my dad, who was in a rock band trying to make it in Hollywood? And that was the other thing. The guy that the lead singer was still in Scientology of the band. The drummer was Chick Korea's son, Thad Korea.

And then my dad and the other guy were not Scientologists. So there's two non-Scientologists and two Scientologists in this band. And they do gigs at the Celebrity Center. They'd play at the Scientology Celebrity Center for events and stuff. They would do things that were kind of Scientology adjacent. And a lot of their fans were in Scientology. And Lisa Marie Presley was living at the Celebrity Center. across the street she was a living there yeah she lived there from when she was very very young

when she from when she was a teenager priscilla just plopped her there and and her boyfriend at the time her first husband ended up being her first husband went to school with thad at the same Scientology school that i went to in los angeles they have another one in in Oregon so all of these people are all they're all connected in six ways of fucking Kevin Bacon I'm two away. I fucking got counseled by Tom Cruise and he was in a movie with Kevin Bacon to a few good men. So boom, right there. Anyway.

That's one degree. Is it one? Yeah. You're zero if you're on Kevin Bacon. But two, but Kevin, but Tom is the first degree. So I would be the second degree. Second degree. Second degree.

Okay. Either way. Curis Cedric. The six degrees of Kevin Bacon is very real. For me. I don't know about any of that. Yeah. He's a real far as gone.

Anyway, but either way, I could escape that when I went to go see my dad. And then as I got a little older, then I started going to Scientology schools, like in elementary school. Then I had to go to, it was called Apple School in Hollywood. And that's where Meno Palouse, who was an actor at the time, was on this show, I think it was called Voyagers. Punky Brewster went to my school. Didn't Leah go there too? I don't think Leah went to Apple School. I can't remember.

But anyway, there was a lot of Scientology kids that were also actors. Vani Rabisi, he's an avatar. Yes. He went to- Giovanni Ravani. Yeah, when we were kids, he was just Vani. He wasn't Giovon.

Yeah, another great actor. God, they got some talent over there. Yeah. He was literally my best friend for a few years. Giovanni Rabisi. Giovanni Rabisi. We went to school together. And I had a mad crush on his twin sister, Marissa.

and she was actually, I think, my first official girlfriend. Which is funny because I went to a school and had a mad crush on Vani. Anyway, but as the years went by, I eventually ended up with my mom most of the time. And if I was with her, I had to do Scientology. There's no not. You can't not do Scientology. Do you remember, though, from before you were six, before she was introduced to it, what her personality was like? And if so, did you see outside of obviously adhering to Scientology?

Did you see like a massive shift in who she was as a person when she joined? It's tough because I have very little memory before we moved to L.A. because I was six. Right. So I remember a few key memories when we were in Kansas City. And I don't remember much else about my mom or my dad or my sister. I remember like a birthday getting a Star Wars cake with the fucking Darth Vader and a C3PO and RTT and the space shuttle. And I remember going like, these fucking guys don't even know what Star Wars is. There's no space. There's no fucking space shuttle in Star Wars. What the fuck's going on?

That's one of my earliest memories going, the fuck? But once we moved to Hollywood, my mom did grow up old school on a farm. So there was a lot of getting thrown around and a lot of getting slugged and getting beat the shit out of when I was little. I remember that. That's the constant threat, just a lot of abuse. My dad never touched me. So there was, I sort of associated the violence with Scientology. Because in Scientology, if someone is doing something that's not per the Scientology kind of code of conduct,

it's okay if you give them a fucking black eye every once in a while. That's it's in policy. It's written in the policy. It's okay to take them in the back alley and give them a black eye. Yeah. So that, my mom really followed that policy to the T. So there was that kind of going on. And then also the constant pressure to do Scientology, do Scientology, do Scientology.

And I never really was totally into it. I was good at it. I'm a great, like, if you tell me, this is what I'm supposed to do, and I'm going to be fine if I do that, and you want me to do it, and you're not going to beat the shit out of me. If I do it, I'm going to do it as good as I can. Yeah, you're a go get. But I don't want to, I'm doing it to not have that.

I'm not doing it because I want to do it. And so. He didn't believe it. You were just like. I did. I thought I was kind of like, how can this dude that wrote all this in the 60s, know what the fuck's up with me right here right now? He don't know shit.

Yeah. He's dead. How does he know? From my perspective, when you're raised in it and you're literal, everything you know in life depends on being fully in, it's not a viable conversation even in your head to ask, do I believe this? That's right. Yeah. Whereas you have the understanding of the other side. Yeah. And so then eventually I end up going to this school in Los Angeles called the Delphi Academy. And it's a 100. percent Scientology school. The Guardian's office guy, ex-felon, out of jail where the, was the headmaster at the place. Was that the Winthrop guy? No.

Henning Health. And he was also a giant lump of shit, too. And he sounds like they missed him in World War II, man. And he was English, and he had one of the classically bad sets of English teeth. And I was just like, dude, I don't even know how you can be the public face in person. And he did you got like chicklets in there, dude. You got, it's horrible, okay? Anyway, and then my dad moved to Nebraska from Hollywood.

He moved to Nebraska. He said, I'm out of L.A. I'm done with California. Is your sister still with you? My sister and me live with my mom. Is your, and she's pulling her into Scientology too? Oh yeah, my sister's like straight A Scientology. To this day?

To this day. To this day. She's 100% Scientology, Scientology, Scientology. So when I go to this school, it costs. It's like 500 bucks a month. This is the 80s. It's a private school. Well, my mom can't afford to send me there, and my dad just bugged out to Nebraska.

And so for me to keep going to the school, I got to work at the school. So I work there half the day, and I'm a student the other half of the day. Was that legal? I don't know. I was 14. I didn't have my lawyer side check the arrangement. Anyway, so I'm working But now, and also I'm having

And I'm on the outs with my mom full time, full time. Like don't want to be with her, don't want to talk to her, don't want to, she's trying to shove Scientology so much down my throat that I'm like, I can't do it anymore. This is crazy. She wants me to work for her and her husband's company for free as, as exchange for living with her. And he's in Scientology, your stepfather. Yeah.

Did you have any kind of relationship with him? No. Not at all. Didn't like him. He was a big dork and I could give two shits about him. Right. Shout out to Dan. Shout out to Dan.

Anyway. Did you feel like at any point, did you feel like your mom loved you? No. No. I feel like she would if I did Scientology. That's not love. That's. But that was my view.

So here I am. I'm 14. I'm working for money and to pay for my school. Even after I covered the school with my work, they give me a little extra. They give me a few hundred bucks a week and cover my school. I moved out with my mom. I didn't live with her.

I live with my friend. My 14. Yeah. And then he joined the Seahorke. My friend joined the Seahorch. The one I lived with because I didn't want to live with. my mom his family moved to florida and clearwater and he joined the seahork so then i had to move in with another friend at school and this is where i'm just like i'm 14 you got to remember that i'm

14 i'm now i have to get myself to school i have to feed myself and somehow also work at school and and do school and learn shit and in in in scientology they don't have grades at the scientology schools No grades. They have these things called forms. And basically you do form one, form two, form three, form four, four, five, for six, and so on. But when you're done, it's like you, when you graduate at 18, you've done two years of pre-college by the time you graduate. It's some weird system they have. Regardless, not accredited means nothing.

A ton of the kids that actually did graduate the school when I went to college, college. It's like, you went to a fucking made-up fucking thing. This says fucking nothing for it. You could have gone to fucking Hogwarts. It might have been better. More people know about Hogwarts in this Scientology space. Again, how is that legally allowed? Who's telling on them?

Nobody. They're all, they're not going to tell on each other. Then they get suppressed a person. Yeah, but can't the government, like, look at this. And if they're not, I didn't want it, and be like, all right. There's a bunch of kids at this school. They're not schooling. There's no incentive for anyone to shut any of this down, really.

No incentive? Yeah. Just because it's wrong and it's bad, it's like that's a lot of work to fuck with these guys. And you need a budget. Yeah, but like if I'm at the FBI and I take down Scientology, that's a career maker. The way it was explained to me within the, by some of within the government was we need to have the gun that David Miscavage used to shoot somebody. We need to have him on video shooting the fucking people. And we need to be able to say he was.

there at that time when that person had as he's exiting the room with the gun in his hand. If we don't have that, we ain't doing any, we ain't got anything on this guy. That's kind of how it was explained to me. But either way, I move in with this other friend, her name was Lauren, and I lived with her and her parents, and her sister went to the same school, but the organ location.

And so I lived in her room. I lived in the sister that wasn't in town. She was out of boarding school. I lived in her room. That family joined the C-organization. Everywhere you go, they go and they get a bump. So I'm just like, the fuck. I can, like, it's like four months here, four months here.

Okay, so I moved to one last place. And I say, no more friends. I got to stop going with the friends because they're all young that join in the C-org. I end up living with a teacher that goes to the school. She had a son that I was kind of friends with over the years, but he didn't go to that school anymore. He lived with his dad, whatever.

And so I stayed in his room with this teacher. I lived with her. And I lived with a teacher that worked at my school and this random lady who was a paramedic who kind of dabbled in Scientology. It was literally like, I'm trying to think of a sitcom that this is like. It was like Three's Company, but I was 14.

There isn't one. No, it's Three's Company. I lived with two broads that were older than me and I was 14. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. you're 14. Like you, you didn't have a childhood at all. I did. I had ramen, but you wouldn't boil in water. You just sprinkle the packet on and eat it like a sandwich. Anyway, so you just sprinkle the package on. I'm telling you, you're eating the same thing with less water.

And it's quicker. It kind of tastes the same. If you're 14 and you're living on your own, chances are you don't have a good pot to boil water in. Anyway, so. So then these people from the C organization came to the school. And over the years, the C organization would send people from the C-O-RIC to the school to interview students and see who could get, they could get to join the C-O-REC organization. They call them Recruiters. C-Rug Recruiter's. And they made a rule because they were poaching so many kids from the schools.

No more recruiters talking to the students. It was a rule at the school. No more. You can't send the recruiters over here. here because they're stealing all our kids. And they were getting complaints from the parents. Yeah, it was a big issue. Anyway, so they send a team of recruiters over there,

but the recruiters aren't focused on the kids. They're focused on the staff, the Scientology School faculty. And so I'm like, fucking, they can't touch me. I'm a fucking student. So there's no way I'm going to get roped up and pressured into joining the Seorg. And when you grow up in Scientology, there's always there's this thing, you will end up in the seorke.

Somehow, some way, it will happen. If you stay in this bubble, the only route is to go into the seward. It's pretty much inevitable. Your parents want it. Everybody around you wants. It's the most dedicated thing you can do as a Scientologist to give your entire rest of your life

to Scientology. So I'm at this place, at the school, the recruiters come. They recruit the fucking lady. that I'm living with. God damn it. They got her into the Seward. And I was like,

and then I was just like, this is the fucking, how is this possible that I, they should hire me. Whoever I live with ends up in the seal. They should, I'm their best recruiter.

You're like, do you have a couch at the Seward? Yeah, I'm good. I fucking, I'll bring in a fucking two people a week for you guys. Yeah. Anyway,

so when that happened, I basically gave up. I was like, I gave up. I was like, I'm 14. I'm trying to feed myself. I'm eating fucking dry ramen. That's a, that's a low for even a 14 year old. A lot of bologna sandwiches.

I'm, I don't have a car. I can't, I can't drive. I can't drive. I'm fucking, I'm, well, no. You're wrong. When my dad lived in Nebraska, I went to Nebraska and I got a driver's license because in Nebraska, you can drive when you're 14 because the kids are driving tractors down the highway and the farm. Wait, to this day? I don't know if it's still like that, but I was driving in California

when I was 14 with a Nebraska license. Wow. So if they pull me over, I'm like, you can see your license right here. It's from Nebraska. That's where I fucking live. You know, so I was rocking a Nebraska license until I got a legit California license. What a flex. And also in California, when you're 16, you have to do driver's ed, driver's training. You have to do all this bullshit to be able to get to go to get a license. If you're from out of state and you already have a license, you just go to the DMV and say, hey, I need to re-up for a California one. They take that one. They go, okay, fine. They hold, plunge it and they give you a California one. So I did have a license, but I did not have a car. Anyway, at that point, I was basically like, I can't, I'm, I was basically, I'm getting a little bit of

emotional even think about it. I could not do it anymore. I was like, I can't. I can't. I can't. I was I'm 14. I don't even know what the fuck's going on, but I don't, I'm not making enough money. I'm, I can't fucking, I don't have any more people to live with. I've run out of all my people. And I'm like, these guys, these Seorg recruiters said, we have a drug rehabilitation center in Oklahoma. And it's C.org, but we have to get minimum wage because we're not, we're not working in a religious facility. We're working at a drug rehab. So you'll be a C-org member, but you won't get 40 bucks a week. You'll get minimum wage. And you'll be in the middle of Oklahoma. You'll be helping get people off drugs. And you don't have to keep going to school. Fuck school. You're done with that.

By this time, I think I'm almost 15. They're like, yeah, you don't have to go to school. You don't have to do this. I'm like, well, I thought I'd have to go to school once a week. They said, you can do like courses and extension courses and you can still get a GED. if you want to. But after you turn 16, you don't have to do anything. You just say, fuck it, I don't have to do school anymore.

And I don't need a diploma in Scientology. No one gives a shit about a diploma in Scientology. So I'm like, fuck it. I'll do it. I'm out of options. I'm going to get three hots and a cot. I'm not going to worry about getting paid. They're going to give me this minimum wage.

And you didn't think about going back to your debt because you weren't into Scientology. You were in it, but you weren't into it. My dad, my dad wasn't doing well enough that he could pay. He couldn't support me. So he was barely supporting himself. So and also, if I go to Nebraska, I don't know fucking anybody in Nebraska. I don't have any social group there.

I don't know anybody. I don't know anything. And your sister's, your sister's still with your mom? My sister's with my mom. She's not going to go with my dad. So then I go. I go and I join. I sign that fucking billion year contract.

I go and I join the C organization. And when you join the C organization, there's a course that you do. It's called Welcome to the C.org. Welcome to the C.org course. Very welcoming. At least that's very straightforward. And when you do that course, you find out you have to go wherever the fuck they tell you whenever the fuck they tell you. And it was that.

And do whatever the fuck they tell you. And when I read that, whether you are trained in that or not. Does not matter. When I read that, I was like, fuck, I'm never going to Oklahoma. These motherfuckers are going to fucking do a switcheroo on me or something. And sure enough, when I graduated, you do this thing called the Estates Project Force. That's like the Seorg boot camp. You go through Seorg boot camp.

And I was made my first job in the Seorg. I was the vice president of personnel for an international Scientology. organizations and I was in charge of recruiting C-Worg members for that organization. My first job for an international. Yeah, I was 15. That was my first job in the C-organization. And I recruited a total of one person for the C-organization. And that was my sister.

So I got her in to save my ass. And then I got fired from that job and made the head of accounts for that organization. By this time, I'm 15 and a half. So I learned a thing or two about things. And I was the vice president for what they called Treasury. I was the vice president for Treasury. And then he had to compile their financial planning and approve their budgets and all that kind of stuff. At 15 and a half.

Yeah, 15 and half. I was reconciling bank accounts. 100%. I'm telling you. I was the best vice president of Treasury that they ever had. And that. That was in Hollywood as well. It was on Hollywood Boulevard.

It's called the Hollywood Guarantee Building. And the organization that I worked for was called the Association for Better Living and Education. And they were the organization. Abel for short. Yeah. And they were the organization that was in charge of the drug rehabilitation programs, the Scientology schools. There's a thing called the Way to Happiness Foundation. Way to Happiness.

And the Criminon Foundation. and they basically do extension courses for people in jail. They send them extension courses. They learn about Scientology in jail. And then they fill out the workbook and then they send it in. And then they get a little diploma saying they're not a criminal anymore. And they get this pinned up on their wall and their jail cell for the next 10 years. Anyway.

And then from there, one of my friends, a few of my friends that joined the Sea Org about a year or two before. me when they were 13 or 14 or whatever they were on their way to go to the headquarters and when we got to then when they got to the headquarters they put me on a list that people that should go up to the headquarters so i'd only been into seorg maybe a year or so before i went to the the international headquarters and when i got there i was probably one of the youngest people there when i was 16 i was I think I just, I either turned 16 or I just turned 17. Either way, I was 16 or 17. And there was maybe a handful of kids there that were a little bit younger than me.

But most of the young people there were either in their early 20s or late 20s. And there wasn't a lot of youngans there. Are you at this point somewhat of a believer? Or is it still just like, well, this is the thing to do? This is a kicker. When I joined the C organization, the relationship with my mom was permanently fixed. There was never, I can never do a thing wrong in her eyes after I joined the C organization. Did you feel anything based on that?

Like, did you feel like, oh, we have a good relationship? I just realized this is all that she wanted. This is it. She just wanted me to be in Scientology. And so then once I was at the Corg, she was like a doting mother, like my kids in the Corg. And guess what? He got my, he got his sister in too. I got two kids in the Seahork.

And I also never saw her after that either. After I went to the, I saw her when I was in Los Angeles here and there. But once I moved to the international headquarters, very, I want to literally say I maybe saw her three or four times in 15 years. Are you so like. And then she ended up joining the Seorg a few years later. So you're like never leaving the base effectively. When I was first there for the.

the first two or three years, you were pretty much at the base full time. We would leave the property and go to apartments. So the international headquarters is in Gilman Hot Springs, California. There's Hemet and San Jacinto, or the two adjacent towns. And the Seorg had apartments in Hemet, and they had apartments in San Jacinto. And we would just take like a 15-minute bus ride to either, depending on where you lived. At 11 o'clock at night, you get on a bus and they take you home. And then at seven, 745? 745 to get picked up from the bus. Is this a Scientology bus?

100%. Yeah. So it's not old school buses, like the ones you see in like Shawshank, you know, like those were the white old timey school buses were, they had like four or five of those and they would, they were riding on hot, they were, it was, you were getting a good ride in there. No seat belts, no seat belts. They smelled like shit. It smelled like teen spirit in there all the goddamn time.

And so then I worked in manufacturing for the first few years. And that's when I got counseled by Tom Cruise. And then I got such a little flex. Like, I could counsel but Tom Cruise. It was. And also, when we did that thing when I went to the canteen, that was it. It was all out. When he took me to go get the bee pollen, the whole property knew within two hours.

And then you were done with that. No, no. I still was doing it. But it was not a secret anymore. Oh, so how long did you get, we talked about this in the last episode. How long did you get counsel? by him. It's probably over like two or three months. Just every day I'd

go up there. She spent two or three months every day with Tom Cruise. Yeah. Just talking about Scientology. Yeah. And you know the crazy thing was in all my time in Scientology? I never heard about this B-Paul and bullshit. Like, he knew things that were

like weirdly super Scientology. And I was like, how the fuck does this guy know about B-Paul and getting you through your test on the E-meter? And he knew lots of weird things like that, but he was still a green weenie when it came to Scientology. A green weenie? Yeah, so like he was a green. He was a green. He was a new guy. He was a, he didn't have a green weenie. He was just green. Anyway, all this alien talk. Is that part of it?

Yeah, Lord Zeno gives you a green weenie. You guys comparing swords? Like what's going on back there? No, none of that. You sure? I'm positive. Point on the teddy bear where Tom Cruise does. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Anyway, when he took me, when I rode the bike to the thing, that was sort of like when everybody was like, what the fuck is Headley doing with him? It's like, I'm kind of a big deal. And then it got spread around. There was one other guy that he was also counseling who ended, who was actually the security chief of the property.

But he hadn't done any Scientology counseling. He still is to this day. And he still is the security chief. Did Tom ever ask you if you ordered the code red? No. No, that was, I think it, was it before a few good men? Yeah, it was right before. Yeah.

I don't know if he practiced on you. Yeah. No, he didn't. The weird thing, though, was that Kirstie Alley was never at that property. Why not? Because she wasn't that kind of celebrity. She was a big celebrity, but there was no reason to bring her to that property. Up until this time.

Up until this time. She would just go to the Celebrity Center. That's where celebrities go and study their courses. But Tom Cruise can't be at the Celebrity Center. He's above a celebrity. He's like a fucking rock star. He's fucking top gun. Anyway, so when they did this, they wanted Nicole and him to feel like this was a normal thing that they were being brought to this headquarter property.

So they had Kirstie Alley there and she was reading course, just reading whatever. She wasn't doing any courses. She's just reading Scientology books at the. the table where Nicole is studying and where Tom is studying or doing the counseling as a prop, really. They just brought her there as a prop. So even when I'm seeing it, I'm like, what the fuck is Kurt? When I walk into the room, it's like, this is Nicole. Hey, Nicole. Nice to meet you. This is Kirstie. I'm like, I know Kirstie. But I was like, what the fuck is she doing? Anyway, but then I'm up and down through positions all over the place there. But the whole time,

I always have this connection to Dave Miscavish, no matter what I was doing. He was either heavily involved with the manufacturing when I was doing that. When I was quality control, I had to check all of the products that left Golden Air Productions. And once I checked it, it would then go to him to check.

So if I checked something that was bad, it was my ass, and he'd fucking ream me out and talk a bunch of shit. And then I ended up being in the shoot crew, doing all the films, and then pre-production and then manufacturing of... That's where you'd love. Learned all that stuff.

Yeah, I mean, when I was, basically, from the time I was 16 to 31, I was involved with manufacturing of cassettes, manufacturing of CDs, manufacturing of DVDs, film production, video production, post-production. And don't forget, we're not talking 40 hours a week. So when you, when we did the math of our, you know, our work history in this organization, compare that to real world standards of 40 hours a week. We're in our 70s.

What's the 10,000? Is it 10,000 hours for a 13,000 hours? I was clocking 10,000 hours on a trade every two years. That's enough. So expert in manufacturing, expert in film production, expert, just from just, and also in Scientology, everything is last minute rush, rush, rush. We got to do this, we got to do that.

So there's a lot of you got to be quick on your feet and you got to be a jack of all trades to be able to solve certain situations and certain problems so that nothing gets fucked here. And so. Hold on. The discipline to do this for such a long time so consistently for so many hours is it's strictly driven by the fear of what will happen if you don't. Well, yeah, but it's also that's the schedule. Yeah, but like you can't not go to work. If you're sick, you're at work. If you're this, unless you have a fever, which they lock you up in an isolation place, if you have a fever. Because that has some pre-COVID shit. Because otherwise you can mess with some other people. And the best part is you have a sniffle.

You have a sniffle. Not a clean room. Like it's the nastiest, nastiest, stinkyest most disgusting corner of that entire property. It's basically like if sick people cleaned up after themselves, they don't. And so all this, you just, it's like a hotel that's only had sick. people with all kinds of problems. Yeah, I got you. Yeah.

Anyway, that was isolation. But anyway, you become, like if there's a problem or a technical issue or something like that, you're like, I know a thousand ways to do this wrong because I work for Scientology. And I know there's five ways that's probably going to work out the best. So that is actually, I believe that 10,000 hours thing. It's just you're learning from mistakes after mistakes after mistakes after mistakes. So when I worked for Scientology, we were fucking shit up left, right and center. And everything was fucked. There'd be books that would go to print with pages upside down.

I mean, people are proofreading after five nights of no sleep. That doesn't work well. So you basically, I was a machine at that place. I didn't give a fuck about Scientology. I wasn't studying Scientology. I wasn't learning about Scientology. I was making widgets. I was making CDs, making DVDs, making VHS.

So for me, if I was busy, I was happy. Everyone focuses on 1984 by Orwell when they cite Orwell. And certainly it's very relevant to Scientology for sure. I don't want to discount that. But I keep thinking animal form. Like if you've ever read that, your horse just work. Yeah, just work. And so that's what I did.

So when when David Miscavage did that fucking little puncher-roo session, that was in 2004, I think. Yeah, it was. It was in 2004. So I'd been through the ringer. And even Tom Cruise came back to the property in the, and I want to say it was in 2004 as well. Yep, it was July 2004. So I hadn't seen him since 1990. Like, what's up, baby?

1990. So it had been 14 years since he counseled me. When he counseled me, I was a, I was actually my, my, when, when you make cassette tapes, they come on a giant pancake of tape. There's 30 cassettes on one reel and you splice them into the cassette shells. Is this like 1960s technology? Probably, yeah, 1970s, early 70s. They, they are about 10 to 15 years behind the real. world and technology for the most part. They roll. I mean, I told you they were doing it's not ironic. They were just called Scientology ain't science and so well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hubbard says science. Scientology means the science. No, the what does he say? It's science ology. It's the study of knowledge. That's what Hubbard says. The study of knowing how to know. The study of knowing how to know knowing how to know. Anyway. It sounds like the priest and and Chuck and Larry. It is a circle. Not that square. Anyway, when he came back, we were doing something.

We had just finished building all these new online and offline edit bays, like avid systems for doing non-linear editing. And we just finished all those huge tech upgrades, millions of millions dollars with equipment. And at this time, I'm now the assistant producer for all of Golden Hour Productions. When I was doing that, when I told you about the pancakes, my job title was Pancake QC. pancake QC? Pancake quality control. That was my actual, that was my post title. That was my post title.

When we went to go visit our parents when we got married and they said, what are you doing? I said, well, my post is the pancake QC. And they were literally like, they've got motherfuckers checking their pancakes. What the hell? This place must be utopia. Not a bad pancake in the bunch. It's so embarrassing to me, but I think it speaks to the level of oblivion that our parents had no idea idea where we were, what we were doing, like just were completely loose.

And they're okay with it. Right. Yeah. That's what's so bizarre to me because Scientology seems to, from everyone I've talked to, teach you to disconnect from bloodlines because that's just this earth. What is the term like your body's a container or whatever? Yeah. You're a Thayton.

Your spirit or what they call a Thetae. Yeah. And this is just you. This is just your meat body. Yeah. And when you die, you discard the meat body. And then you, the Thayton, goes and picks up a new body. Yeah.

So they don't believe, they believe that you've lived millions and millions and millions of lifetimes in galaxies, light years from here. You've been, you've done everything. You've been everywhere. And this is just this version of you now with the body. So there's no real. familial connection. When you'd say that, well, then my mom's not really my mom, because I've had a million moms. This makes the Joseph Smith golden tablets sound feasible. Right. Yeah. No. When you hear this shit. Well, even Mormons, there's a, there's like memes like Mormonism making science or

Scientology making Mormons look normal for 50 years. Maybe that's what it is. It's a, because there's a lot Mormons and CIA. And also, maybe they're like, hey, we got to get the heat off. Well, the reason there's a lot of Mormons in the CIA is because they don't do drugs. They're not allowed to drink. They don't cheat on. They're not supposed to cheat. They're more straight-laced company men.

In Scientology, David Miscavage on many, many occasions was like when we were built, when we build these new organizations and outfit them with all these brand new systems, he would say, I want you guys to look at what the Mormon. are doing because those guys are doing it right. And so he looked, he looked to the Mormons as aspirational. Like look at these, look at these churches they're setting up and look at all the technology that they use and all this other stuff. So.

And they're tithing and all, there's many things in Scientology that were patented off that. But like look at that history. I didn't know much about this and then there was this mini series, American Prime Evil came out a year and a half ago. Those Mormons were fucking crazy, bro. They were murking people left and right. That's extreme Mormonism. Yeah, I'm not saying that's all Mormons.

I'm just saying, like, you know, the whole no vice thing. Yeah. Let's look at what built it. You know what I mean? Yeah, true. Anyway, so then in 2004 is when I started, I was basically starting to be like, you know what? I'm doing amazing work here.

And I'm the only one who knows all about most of this technology. You guys are oblivious. You guys are doing dumb shit from 20 years ago. And I'm trying to bring us into the future here with our systems and stuff. And you're worth $97. Yeah. Yeah. $0.36 an hour I'm getting paid.

And during the same time, I'm working in Religious Technology Center directly with David and Shelley Miscabbage. And Mark came to find out that I was going to get kicked out because I'd refuse to divorce him. She was going to, she was, so this, at this time period, she's going to get basically kicked out of Religious Technology Center because she's married to me. Because I didn't like you at this point. Well, no, no, no. If you're in Religious Technology Center and you're married to anyone who's not in Religious Technology Center, you had to get a divorce or you got kicked out. All right. Let's back this up for a second because now I got the full context of how you came up through this mark.

But Claire, we started to talk about it the last episode very quickly where your mother and, and father were in it. Your father goes to leave when you're three. You do remember when he left. They put you in a reprogramming school right after that to tell you why daddy was a bad guy. Yep. Just very, very sinister and you actually do remember this, which is wild. I don't remember like anything when I was three. But after that, you alluded to it early. You went into the school. You're living in the UK. It's, you know, you're totally built into the system. Where is your mom during this time? And what was, like, Like, what was your development like on the way to the seawork? Yes.

So from age four to 10, I was in the cadet organization in the UK. And all through that time, I barely saw my mom. Like, when I was six, she was sent to Europe. And I was just turned over to another family to keep an eye on me that I barely knew. So, you know, she wasn't there for Christmas. She was just gone for, like, two, three months. off in Europe. Also, during that time, she, so she was a, she's single.

She had a boyfriend. Also in this organization, they had sex. She was sent to the rehabilitation project for, so I wasn't allowed to talk to her then for months. And you were like seven when that? Yeah, seven. She ended up, in the RPF, they were working on a construction site, and she ended up getting hit in the head with a brick and got a,

severe concussion was rushed to the hospital. So then she got brought back to me and I was trained on how to do touch assists. Touch assists? Yes. So there's... How old are you? Seven. And so that way...

I got to say, I got to say, we can't skip over touch assist. Okay. Yeah. You touch a person on their body. Okay. All over. This is not creepy. You touch all over and you touch one side.

Like, you touch here. And then you touch here. But this is the best point. Feel my finger. You say, feel my finger. You say, feel more. My finger. You go, feel my finger?

And they go, feel my finger? Or the other version is. And they go, and this is where it gets really, really sketchy. If you're doing a touch assist, if you're a dude and you're doing a touch assist on a woman, you go right here. Then you go right here. And you go right here. Dangerous. Yeah.

Right here. And then you go down to lower regions. You got to go in the inside of the thigh and the outside of the thigh. And, and this is, I want to say this as long as we're doing this, inside. In Scientology, there are oftentimes when kids are doing these on adults and adults are doing these on kids. Yeah. And it does go sideways. And that is a thing that happens in there.

So you had to do this with your mom. Yeah. To nurse her back to good health after. And you're seven. Yeah. You have no concept of what you're doing. No. You're just told you have to do this shit.

Yeah. Is anyone else in the room when you're doing it? No. How often would you have to do this? like four or five times a day whenever she said she needed a touch assist there's they have a touch assist and they have a nervous there's a whole book of different assists but the main two that scientology do nervouses contact assist body calm uh there's all different ones it's assist technology um but yeah no i was so i that's i was required to get trained on how to do that to then

nurse her back to health and the overwhelming thing that i remember so that's distinctly about this is I didn't care. I hadn't seen my mom in months. I was just happy to be in the same goddamn room with her. Whatever the requirements of that were didn't matter to me. Did you feel like your mom loved you? I hoped she, I desperately wanted her to, but I and I felt in the moment I thought she did. Yes. But looking back on it, I can, and especially as a parent myself now, like, I would say my perspective shifted dramatically, latently when I became a parent. Like all of a sudden, I was like, are you freaking kidding me? When my oldest son turned four, I couldn't help but realize like, holy shit.

That is how old I was when my mom committed to a billion years and my life went to hell in a handbasket. it every milestone of our kids we we we go like oh you know he's seven you're like what happened when you were like that's when my mom got hit in a brick while she was building that castle and you're just like what the hell yeah even even now our oldest son is 20 we were already married by that time three years by the time he's the age he is right now it's cool that you guys get to break the cycle though and get to totally like oh yeah right and like see like okay what did we do that They're, all right, let's do the opposite.

Yes, which has its pros and cons, you know, like, but yes, for sure. We're like, we, I mean, mostly pros, but, you know, not that we don't make mistakes. We all do. There's not a manual that comes of doing it right. But I would error our kids and tend up working more than other kids. Oh, yeah. You beat that discipline in tone. Yeah, no matter, well, no matter how, if Scientology is wrong or Scientology's right,

ain't nobody getting in trouble for doing a lot of work. Right, yeah. So we are. And our kids see how hard we work. Yeah. And I would say they would agree that they have worked hard to, you know, like when they were, when our oldest two were 13 and 11, they came up with a business idea, and we were like, all for it, go for it.

They ran a vending machine business for, they did all the banking, they created the logo, we funded it. And they were making bank. They were making a lot of money. Until COVID hit, they were slaying it. Yeah. Do you, when's the last time you saw your mom? 2011, June.

And she's still in today? Mm-hmm. They moved to Clearwater from Los Angeles. Right, yeah. That's cool. So do you chalk it up to your mom? Like, when did she? join again? Sorry, that was the question. When I was, well, she got into Scientology when she was

pregnant with me. She joined the Sea Organization when I was four years old. Okay. And she ended up, so early 70s. Yeah. Yeah. What got her into when she was pregnant with you? Why did she join? What's the story? Her brother, my uncle, her older brother, got into Scientology. I actually don't know how he got in. He's still into this day. He's a C.org member in the UK. So he pulled her in? Yeah, he pulled her in. She bought into it. Yep.

And my dad also got in at that time. He got out. But again, I never, I've had a relationship with him the entire rest of my life. You've never seen him? No. Do you forgive your dad for leaving? I do. I'm glad he left.

Yeah. You know, I always, he. as a child growing up in that environment, I always wanted to believe in the fairy tale, like the godmother who swoops in and saves the, you know, I wanted to believe in that being a possibility. Obviously, it didn't ever happen to me, but no, I absolutely, you know, I don't, and I don't blame him either

for wanting to get far away from that, absolutely. Do you ever wonder why he didn't, try to take you with him though sure yeah yeah absolutely do you know where he is today yeah he's in england i have reconnected with my aunts and uncles from his family and they are amazing people super supportive i just think um at least as i understand it he was already the black sheep of his family so it's complicated i guess would be a simple solution it's not like i'm looking for my daddy you know like obviously that ship sailed a long friggin' time ago. Yeah. But, you know, it's, it sucks losing family to Scientology. And I would say that

Mark and I have both worked to build relationships outside of that for, for our sakes, but also for our kids. Because growing up in an environment where unconditional love is a complete, non-existent, distant, like, there's just not, it's not an option. We've worked really hard to surround our kids with unconditional love what we call family of choice. Did you have to teach yourself what love is? Absolutely. Yeah. Because you didn't even know how to feel that.

Yeah. How do you do that? Just trust in finding a way and finding, you know, sorting out, walking back all those years of programming and, yeah, I mean. I was going to say in the C-org, nobody is to be trusted. Yeah. nobody if you don't know that something happened it didn't fucking happen you and also it's very dog-eat-dog so there's a lot of people to throw you under the bus so they can get a leg up and so we

went from not trusting even each other would i was comp 100% confident if i told her hey i'm thinking to leave and she would wrap me out he almost did but but but and and we talked about this on lea remini scientology in the aftermath i know i didn't get home that day that he took off. He had radioed me and asked me if I was coming home at 4 o'clock in the morning. Radioed you. Yeah, like a nextel phone radio thing.

Chup, jup. Go ahead. And I've got the I den. I said, literally, I said, hey, you coming home? She's like, I don't know. I was like, missed your window. I ain't going to be there at the Magic Johnson. Yeah, missed your window because I'm GTFO.

And we talked about this. And because and just honestly, I don't know what had we had that conversation, I might have turned him in. She would have 100% turned me in. No, even even, but here's what's crazy. Here's what's crazy about this. Even if I wanted to GTFO, I, the fear factor, I honestly don't know. Like, it's not that I, it's not that I would have turned him in because I, I, I, I, I, I honestly, I don't know. because I didn't want to get out of there.

It's because I was afraid of so many layers of it. Like just, I don't know. It's complicated. Do you guys feel like during these years, it's so hard to process these questions, right? But like, do you feel sadness? Do you feel despair? Do you feel ups and downs? Do you feel your hormonal?

regular hormonal swings and stuff like that? Or are you so outside it that it's like it's always just kind of here. Work, work, work. No, no. We, I think we have decompressed and well adjusted ourselves. Like I was going to say, I mean back then. Oh, back then? Yeah.

Oh, no, you don't. You don't feel anything. You're, you're, well, in Scientology. It was breaking us emotionally. That's how I look back on it because I go, the ideal. C organization member would be parallel to an android like just a robot

a robot to carry out orders and do what's required of them so to the point where after I escaped I felt broken emotionally completely like how do I even process this you know how do you work through that you know yes there's therapy there's books and

I'm like, I'll do it all. In Scientology, and specifically in the Seorg, it's okay to get mad that work isn't getting done. It's not okay to cry about somebody who broke your heart or somebody who said some mean words to you. Did you cry grown up? Either are you? I cried all the freaking time. Are you kidding? It's natural, yes.

Absolutely. I cry. I was every single week when I, and this is again, talk about child. core memories, the two hours a week that I got to spend with my mom, when she would go back to work, I would cry the entire rest of the day. I would try and try, I would write completed staff work at six and seven years old saying, can I please go with my mom to work? Completed staff work in Scientology, if you want to do anything. You have to have approval.

You have to have approval and you have to call, it's abbreviated, most people don't even write. You have to write a CSW, a completed staff work. So you have to say, listen, I'd like to go see my kids on Sunday morning instead of cleaning my room because I haven't seen my kids in a month. And my daughter's about to start something new and I'm probably not going to see her. Is it okay that I spend an hour and a half with my child on Sunday morning? And then she has to get that approved by her boss and her boss's boss. And ultimately in most cases.

In my case, I was writing a CSW two other kids saying, can I go spend the afternoon with my mom? And it would always get disapproved. Nope, you can't do it. And I would cry the entire rest of the day. And... So you would quit, so, and you're a kid, that's what you're supposed to do. Like, you can't be with your mom.

You cry. But they're beating out of you the recognition of what these emotions means. So you have a human reaction, it's physical, based on hormones and everything as well, but you are not in touch with the fact. that I am sad right now. The way it feels like to me is it's almost like they stick you, without sticking you on a drug, they stick you on lithium. And they slowly take you away from your fucking body.

Yeah. In Scientology, they don't want you to be Claire the Scientology. Claire, Claire, they want you to be Claire the Scientologist. Yeah. And Claire the Scientologist doesn't have emotions. She doesn't get upset about things. She doesn't, she just does what you're supposed to do when you're in Scientology. And even how that was dealt with was completely Scientological.

B, hey, stop being banky. Banky. Yeah, banky. So in Scientology, they believe that you have your analytical mind and your reactive mind. Your reactive mind is also called your reactive bank. And that's the source. That's where your engrams live. Moments of pain and unconsciousness.

Anything you do irrational is coming from your reactive mind or your reactive. of bank. So therefore, I was raised with, don't be banky. If I'm crying, I'm being banky, or knock off your case on post, you know, to me as a child. Like, if you, emotions were absolutely negative and forbidden. And yes, I got punished. I was going to say, did they hit you when, when you would cry? Not hit, no, but. There's punishments that are going to be about. restrictions and you know I was put on the equivalent of the rehabilitation project force made to scrub dumpsters with toothbrushes and do all the nasty nasty chores when I that was when I was nine I want to say yeah did you did you have friends did you know how to make friends

no in fact you know it's funny is I I distinctly remember When my family moved to the U.S., I was 13, and they don't have the, at least growing up, I didn't remember the concept of best friends. You know, it honestly always made me uncomfortable, the concept of a best friend. Because growing up in that environment, you're expected to write knowledge reports, and all the snitch culture is baked into your childhood. So you don't trust anybody. Right.

Yeah, I was going to say when we were there, we went from not trusting anybody to then being in the real world and then thinking, oh, everybody's awesome. And then we kind of overcompensated and then we trusted everybody. And then you get burned a few times and you're like, oh, we got to, so there's going to be a happy medium. Yeah, yeah, yeah, finding our way. But we didn't know. That's what I was going to say when we left the Sea Org in 2005.

It was like we have to figure out what we know that's complete bullshit and then what we know that's true. You're born again. Yeah, we have to sift through everything. And also, I made a very, very definite attempt. I said, we can't use the lingo. We can't use. We got to switch off all of that in this world. Old Turkey.

Yeah. And basically figure out how we can live in the real world without high school diploma, without finishing. Like, I would always joke that I was a high school dropout. And then one day I was doing the math and I'm like, oh, I'm a fucking middle school dropout. No, he said it to me, oh, you're a high school dropout. I'm like, dude, I never went to high school. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, you moved to the U.S. when you were 13. Yeah. What precipitated that? It's a little complicated. but my mom had, she got pregnant. Oh, no. So she married my stepdad when I was eight.

He adopted me when I was 10. He was a full-on Scientologist, OT, trained auditor. But he was not in the C-Orc. Did you have any kind of relationship with him? No. Yeah. No. And so he had huge amounts of debts from doing the upper levels of Scientology.

like, you know, $50,000 worth of debt. So, and then my mom got pregnant. And it was when my mom got pregnant was right around the time when they changed the policy to where new kids were not going to be allowed to be born into the C organization. She was told, if you stay, this will be the last, one of the last babies born into the C organization and raised in the cadet organization. So my mom chose to take a one-year leave of absence. Then she ended up, we were living in East Grinstead.

I went to a Scientology school at that time. The UK version of the school Mark went to. And my stepdad is American. So he decided to move back to the U.S., bring us with him so he could make money and pay off all his debts. And where did you move in the U.S.? We ended up in L.A., California, and he took on a job as the head of the Beverly Hills mission. So that was bringing new people into Scientology, which he did until our lawsuit in 2009. Anyway, so my mom was no longer in the Sea Organization.

we moved to the U.S. and so it was 1988 and they just never put me back in school. What did you, like when you, I guess took the flight over here and moved to the U.S. and saw the U.S. as someone who had only really been in the U.K. and had grown up in the cadet school, you know, like totally on the Scientology base, if you will.

Yeah. What was it like to like see L.A.? See the United States a little bit? It was amazing. I mean, I had always wanted to live in the U.S. Did you know what it was before you came? No. No.

I imagined like Disney World and, you know, beaches. So you did, and you said that earlier, I forgot to ask this. You had imagined your life like the fairy godmother's going to come save you and everything. So you had seen some Disney and some movies. You had had access to media like that at some point. A little bit. As a little girl. When you would go to see your grandma.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. When I'd go, my mom would send me to visit my grandmother. And how? Tell me. She would put me on a train in London and just ask some random strangers to keep an eye on me for a three-and-four-hour train ride to Manchester. From when she was like seven or eight. Six.

Six. Before that. Put the kid on a train and, hey, Rando, can you keep an eye on this girl until the Eastwick stop? Even as a child, it was mortifying and embarrassing to me that she did that. Oh, I can imagine. She would also go hitchhiking with her. Yeah. And they were when she was, I was like, your mom was crazy.

She would make me hold the sign. And even then I was embarrassed because she would hold the sign. Yeah. The hitchhiker sign. Yeah. She was a true believer. I think both our moms were both kind of want to be hippies. Yeah.

Yeah. I, my, my biggest memory regarding my mom is that we always had a reverse relationship. Like, I was the adult and she was the child. No, what's coming to, because like you're, you're clearly such an intelligent woman. When you're describing your mom, like obviously, yes, she's brainwashed, but it almost seems like the lights are on, but she's not all the way home. Yeah. That's, wow. It's really sad.

And you had an awareness of it as a kid, though. I mean, good for you for at least having an awareness. Yeah, I mean, I didn't, and honestly, in the moment, I didn't resent her for it. I just wanted her love. Right. I did, you know, but I can remember, like, being really young and she'd be like, oh, I think I'm in love now, and I'd be like, great, here we go. I would think you'd be like, almost like, what's that?

Yeah, no, I'd be like, great, does it, who's going to be my dad? And you had a lot of years there where you weren't with her, like you would only see her a little bit. So now when you come to the U.S. are you with her all the time? Yes. Okay. So now, by now, she's remarried. Now she has three kids. And when she had the first, my first, so they're my half siblings. So you were an only child and then you got half siblings. Starting when I was 10. Yeah. So she had my sister when I was 10, my brother when I was 12, my sister when I was 14. But when we moved to the U.S., they didn't put me back in school. So I looked after my siblings from noon until midnight every day. From when they were babies. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like 13, 14. Wow.

Yeah. So starting when I was 13, they were three, one, and, you know, just a few months old. And I would look after them full time. And that's what she never went back to school because they had a full-time babysitter built into the house. And then anytime that I was, and then any time that I wasn't looking after my siblings, they would send me to do Scientology courses at Celebrity Center. I did them at Valley org in North Hollywood. And so I started doing auditor training. Auditor training. Yeah.

So like I was learning how to use the e-meter. So for example, when I was, let's see, I was 15 when I learned how to do interrogations, you know, like, on adults. Yeah, like you're interrogating a 40-year-old. Right. That's how I learned what masturbation was and all these other kinds of things was from interrogating adults.

Anyway, and then all through this time, I was getting hounded by recruiters to start my contract. I love the look on your face because this is, whenever we do a podcast or whenever we end up talking with somebody and they're asking us all these questions, It's like you had maybe 30 questions before we got here.

And now that we've told you all this, you have 100 questions. It's insane. In podcasts like this, this happens where I have to make a decision to be like, all right, well, I have 30 questions about that one thing. How many times am I going to cut them off or do I just got to let this roll and people yell at me because I didn't ask this? Hopefully you're getting enough information out there. I'm getting a lot. But that's so you got to learn how to take care of. of the children while the parents are basically out to lunch and then you're still doing the

Scientology training you're learning to interrogate adults about who their gumad is I mean it's like again can't relate to it at all but you know you had to grow up when you were four right so you really again I said this to you earlier and I do believe that like I don't think you think you had a childhood I don't think you got that opportunity you really didn't get that opportunity for sure and And then you joined the Sea Org at what, 15, 16? 16. 16. So I forget, did you recruit?

I recruited my sister. You recruited your sister. No, he was already at the headquarters when I joined the C organization. I met her. How did you get recruited again? So I, even that's a freaking shitty story. So my dad, my stepdad, his best friend called my stepdad and said, if she doesn't start her contract tomorrow, I'm going to get sent to the rehabilitation project force.

So my dad, my stepdad basically said, that's it. You got to, you got to do it. The guy that his friend was going to get sent to that rehabilitation. Yeah. So at that point, I felt backed into a corner. And I, as a kid growing up in that shitty environment, I knew that I would eventually be forced to join the C organization. But I also have a very distinct memory at seven of deciding, well, I will join the C organization when I'm 45 years old, because by then my life will be over, and I will have been able to have two kids. Yeah, again, this is my seven-year-old self. I'll be an elderly person at 44. I will have been able to get a job as a teacher because I really

wanted to be a teacher. I will have been able to have two kids, a boy and a girl, and then when I'm old... Oh, yeah, the chromosomes picked out, too. Yeah, I did. I did. I was just a very specific, you know, I had a very specific vision. But, you know, obviously none of that came to be. And I just realized that again, like Mark described, you know, we're being hounded constantly held in interrogation rooms until like one or two o'clock in the morning being told that the world is going to end and that they're depending on us. And, you know, like really, really tough things for any.

teenager to process. While having a shitty home life set up. Yeah. So it's almost like this is my, this could kind of be my get out of jail free cart. Right. Because I can, I don't have to worry about trying to find a new place to live every few months. I'm going to get paid. Yeah, yours made sense.

Yeah. But even her, she's a full-time babysitter. For 20 bucks a week looking after my, and I had no life. Better pay in the sea or. Yeah, that's true. I was like a double what she was making. Yeah, I know. And I had no education.

I had no, you know, I wasn't even going to school. The only people I knew were Scientologists. And the recruiters were just relentless. Anyway, and at one point, when I was 14, I had asked my mom and my stepdad, I said, can you please help me. I cannot get rid of these recruiters. They just will not leave me alone. And my stepdad turned to me and he said, well,

you've done the professional TRs course. So that means you should be able to deal with any communication situation no matter how rough. T.Rs is training routines and that teach you how to confront people and handle their originations. Oh my god. I make it a point to explain when there's a randoscientology's term that gets floating. I know, I know. I try to do it. No, that's there's so many of them. Yeah. It is. And they have a term for everything. They really do.

The next thing is dumber than the last thing. Yeah. Pretty much. Pretty much. And also Hubbard, he was a crazy motherfucker. In addition to just diarrhea of the typewriter. The sky is also up. Yeah.

And other news. Yeah. But he literally had some wild views on a lot of different things. Yeah. And that's all baked into Scientology to this day. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Yeah. So I was 16. joined the C organization and so it was July so by September they had moved me to work in the in Golden Era Productions

in the training department and that's where you guys met that's where we met now you explained earlier that a lot of people get married young in Scientology because you can't have sex before marriage

and so hormones are going you want to go but we also talked about the fact that like you don't really have a concept of like what love is because it's been removed from your life. So what is it like to feel, I guess, like hormonal attraction to each other, but not know how to, you know what I mean? In our case.

Can you move a little bit this way, Mark? Sure. Yeah, yeah. You're good. Yeah, yeah. Just like that just get you on the mark and you're good. In our case, we were not supposed to do anything before we got married, but we did end up doing a little before we got married.

Experimentation. And I mean, I wasn't... Not everything, but... I wasn't willing to drive the car off the lot without it. We're talking like a Mormon in it. Okay? You're talking like a Mormon soak or... No, no. A shaker.

Anyway, what do they call it? Quaking. Quaking. I'm unaware of that one. Oh, yeah, no, that's the soaking, but you pay somebody 50 bucks to shake them. it's got to be a good friend who knows when to shake a little harder or less the tradeoff is you get eight wives later

yeah and you don't want to get some guy with like tennis elbow anyway but when we when we first got married in 92 we both worked in golden air productions and we would see each other a lot We lived in it. We had our own room in an apartment, and we shared that apartment with another couple.

So if you lived in what's called, I'm trying to not use words, it's called 2D birthing. In Scientology, you have eight dynamics. First dynamic is you. Second dynamic is you and another person. And then you have the third dynamic. It just goes and goes and goes. So they just abbreviated. If you live with your wife or your spouse, that's 2D birthing.

If you don't live with your spouse, you live with maybe 10 or 15 other people in the same kind of two-bedroom apartment. There's maybe two or three bunk beds in each bedroom and then maybe four or five or six bunk beds in the living room. And a lot of hairy asses if you're in a dude's dorm. So half of getting married is just less hairy asses in your life. So we had our own little room. All of our, all of the possessions and our entire. your life we're in that room you don't you when you join the sea or you don't bring your shit with you know you have a you have a chest and everything's supposed to fit in that chest and for the

most part they don't encourage or promote you just gathering up shit and things they want to keep you on a lean diet of not a lot of stuff and so i then for some of that time i was on a night shift so I didn't always see her. So like we were ships passing in the night. She would be coming into work and I'd be going home to sleep. Yeah. For the day. So I would go to.

Like we rarely even ate meals together. You guys liked each other. Different. Oh yeah. Like there was a clear attraction there. Oh yeah. No, I scooped her up. She was fresh on the property and she was a young one.

And I also had to have a little ginger fever in the sometimes. So when when I saw her, I was like, this one could be the one. And also, there's not a lot of, there's not a, it's not like you've got 20 models to choose from. Right. So if one comes and, and it could work, we're going to make this one work. Okay. And you were attracted to them.

Yes. And also, we don't have time to. You can blink twice if you're a host. Yeah. We don't have time to socialize. No, but the funny part is that the way that I would, so my whole life being a complete nightmare and train wreck already. I had always considered that I would end up marrying another Scientologist who was highly trained and upper levels and all this. So Mark didn't fit that profile.

But his humor and his down-to-earthness was and his eyes and his eyelashes got me. They used to be a lot longer. There's no dating in this organization either. There's no dating. No, well, because we, the only time we do. You just go. No, no. No, no.

We have a meal break from 12 to 12.30. We have a meal break in the morning. We have a breakfast from 8 to 8.30. We get dropped off by the bus at 8. So 8 to 8.30. That's a half hour. You could eat at the same table as the person. If you had the same designated meal time.

And then you had 12 to 1230 and then 5 to 5 30. Yeah. And if you're in for many of those years, the organization wasn't doing that good. So we only had 15 minute meal breaks. But you're not just looking at it as like, well, we're supposed to get married sometime soon. So you're on the lot. I'm on the lot. Let's go. There is an action. Like you said, there's a real attraction there. Yeah, there's a little bit of courting and like, hey, and let's hang out. So do you think that's like a natural human feeling of like wanting to feel connection and love? Sure. Just weren't aware of what it was.

Well, yeah. I knew. I mean, I had had girlfriends and stuff before. And I had also even been with other girls at that property before she came. Yeah. So. So, real player over there. Yeah, not been with, but was, just Glenn Beck's cleaning up. Yeah. Join my buddy Thayton's, body Thayton's only fans.

How often do you get that, Glenn Beck? What's that? You look like Glenn Beck. I have heard that before from people. Yeah, it was killing me like the whole time. Anyway. Anyway, though. Okay, thank you.

Appreciate it. Anyway, but so you basically have an hour and a half a day to figure out if that's going to, Yeah. So we started that in May. And eat. You got to eat and figure it out. But you've started that time. You're looking forward at that time. We would eat. We would actually eat. And like when you're in the Sea Org, you don't really chew. You just inhale. Because you have to get your food. Go to where the food is. Get the food. Dish it up on a plate. Go to a table. Eat it. Busch your table. And then get out.

What is Scientology food like? Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken. Chicken, chicken. It's literally, you're eating eggs, you're eating chicken. If we, burgers is like a burgers is like we're knocking it out of the park. We're getting burgers this way. Eggs and chicken is, I mean, that's good for gains. Yeah. Yeah.

So we started our, you know, whatever you want to call it in May. Within a week, he asked me, you asked me to marry you. Yeah. Within a week. Within a week. You were that sure? Well, because there's other, for freaking Voltress. You want to, you gotta lock it up.

So she's off, it's off the market. And I remember that moment too. I was like, whoa, I mean, I'm... What do you think when someone, another guy? 17. You're 17. Yeah. You've known a guy for a week.

You've chewed in front of it. No, no. And when did you get to the property though? In September. So yeah, so she'd only been there for like six months, eight months. Yeah. And I'd already... on the night schedule for the first part of that.

Yeah. I didn't even know he existed. But yeah, we, the first time I ever talked to you was that New Year's. So we had gone. That's right. There was a New Year's event. We were required to go down to Los Angeles. And so we didn't get back to Hemet until like four o'clock in the morning.

And that year, New Year's Day we had off so we could stay at the birthing. And my roommate wanted to go to the movies. And but we weren't allowed to go by ourselves. We had to have another person escort us. A male. A male. Females were not allowed to walk around Hemeter, San Jacinto, unaccompanied without a male.

So we went to go ask his roommate to walk us to the movie theater. His roommate was not there. And Mark was like, I'll come with you. I was like, I've got to the movies with you girls. Fuck, yeah. And we went and saw Star Trek 6. Star Trek 6. On brand.

And all three of them. us slept through the entire movie. Yes. So we were literally, when the movie was over, I want to say the credits rolled at everything. And when I woke up, I was like, hey, we got to go. There's nobody here. We're literally in a theater sleeping with nothing even happening. Yep.

Yep. I don't remember if that was the one with the whales in San Francisco. I don't remember what the plot of that movie was because I think I slept through the entire time. But even then he woke us up and made us laugh. He was like, well, good thing it was a good movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was like, look at these two bitches falling asleep. Anyway, after that, after that, I was sort of like, hmm.

And to be fair, she was kind of going out with my roommate. That's why they went to get him to bring him to the East. The old compete competition. And he had a motorcycle, and I had not yet gotten a motorcycle. The property is 500 acres. So if you have to move to different buildings to do your job. Did you know Tom Cruise yet? No.

No. Oh, no. This is two years after that. It's a card you gotta play. Be like, I don't just have Tom Fawkes. Well, he might still your girl, but. Most people around the property, that rumor got, it was well known that that happened. You're the Tom Cruise guy.

Yeah, I was the time. Because even that. That wasn't enough. The fuck. Even that Tom Cruise. I didn't know that. Yeah. Even that Tom.

You didn't know that? I didn't. No. No. She was led with that. No, she was new. I know. Be like, I'm the Tom Cruise guy.

I really, you know, it's kind of crazy. It never really seemed like it was a valuable thing when I was there. It was just weird. It was just random. It was just a weird thing. I know, but it was a weird thing. Only when I left, and actually I have a funny story, Tony Ortega, he was talking to me, trying to ask me about things about Scientology and all this.

And I was like, dude, I've talked to so many people. And whenever I tell them what happened there, they always just print the Tom Cruise shit. They don't say about all this other crazy shit. They just want to hear about fucking Tom Cruise. That's what gets clicks and fucking sells fucking supermarket rags is the Tom Cruise shit. He goes, dude, I'm not like that.

I'm going to cover the science. I'm going to cover it. No, no, no, no. I literally, I hadn't written my book at this time either, I don't think. And he's like, so tell me some of the stuff that happened there. It was when your book came out. Okay. Anyway, then the article's coming out, whatever, Tuesday or Thursday or whatever it is.

I pull it up and it says, Tom Cruise talks to books and bottles. I was like, you mother. Hey, you know that's going in the title. Cruise Auditing Partner. Book it. Anyway, but yeah, we, when that guy, he had a motorcycle and he, my roommate. My roommate.

I had a brief interaction with. You liked the motorcycle. Well, it kind of burned it though because it crashed the motorcycle with her on the back. Yeah. She got all raspberry and scraped up. I got jacked up. Can't have that. And that, and when that happened, I was like, oh, this is my moment.

I'm gonna slide right in there. I ain't got no motorcycle, babe. We ain't gonna get hurt. That's right. Anyway, but then. But yeah, so this started in May, August, and by August we got married. By August. How many deep conversations had you guys had at that point?

Not that many. No. Really. But you just knew. Well, to be fair, so New Year's is when it kind of was like, okay, this could be something. There was another event that happened in March. And we had to go to Los Angeles for that as well. And on that event, it happens at the Shrine Auditorium near downtown L.A.

And that's where Scientology puts on their events back in this time. And in order to go from the international headquarters down to the Shrine Auditorium, you had to go on like a two and a half hour bus ride. And so on that bus ride, I was like, oh, this is where we're going to lock it up because we're going to be two hours there and two hours back. You know, lay that thing down. Oh, yeah. I was holding that hand like it was, this is it.

We're going to do it. Anyway. So, and I think, so that was March. So January, we meet kind of like, oh, okay. that's who you are. She was a supervisor in the training area, so I knew of her because I was training in the room

that she was teaching in. So I was sort of like, I know who she is. And I had actually tried to get one of my other English friends who knew her, he was in one of those pictures when she was back in the UK. Oh, wow. And I was like, dude, what about the, what about the ginger here?

Hook that up. Anyway, he didn't want to, because I think she knew him too well when he was a kid and they weren't that friendly. But then by August we were married. But then she got promoted. A few years later.

Oh, well, I got promoted in 93. She's above you. Well, I got promoted in 93. And then I ended up getting sent to Denmark. So I was working in Denmark for months and months and months. What were doing in Denmark? I was building, I was putting cameras in those councils. rooms in their headquarters in Denmark.

And I literally, I think I installed maybe 50 rooms with two cameras and a little button microphone in the table so that you could pick it all up. And we installed film rooms. I just installed all these audio visual systems and their headquarters in Denmark. But then after that, I got sent to Florida to put in. And you guys aren't together during all this. Right. She's still in California the whole time.

Yeah. And then when I went to Florida, I was building, setting up audio visual systems for David Miscavage's personal spaces. So like in his room where he slept. I have to insert one thing. So while Mark was in Denmark, David Miscavage stopped me one night at midnight when I was leaving to go home on the bus in California and asked me if he was having an affair. Like he for years screwed with our relationship And he was always trying to tell her to divorce me

Like always But that that was There had been a couple of instances before that But that was the worst because Or it was the most significant starting point It got much much worse later Did you ever make a move on you No part of it or was strictly to fuck with you?

Strictly to fuck with me Yeah But it was very effective. Like, I mean, imagine I'm, you know, by now 18, 19, we've been married for a year and a half. And the top guy in Scientology is telling me that my husband's cheating on me. Yeah. Fun. What a guy.

Yeah, he was not the best wingman. But real quick, can I just go to the bathroom? And we'll pick it right after. Yes. You can say no to me. I'm like back to sign all of that.

All right, we're back. Did you guys when, when you got married and obviously like David Miskavage's is,

or Miscavage is, we like to call it. Whatever. I like that. Miskavage. Davey boy. He's trying to fuck with you guys

with your relationship while you guys are also both geographically separated and everything. But like, did you feel like you were in love

and did you want to have kids? Like, were these, any type of conversations or feelings you're having early on in the marriage? You can't really have that conversation because in Scientology, if you talk about leaving, that is a suppressive act. If you talk about leaving Scientology, to another person in Scientology. Even your husband. Yeah.

So having kids would be essential to leaving. Because if you leave, there's a policy in Scientology where if you leave Scientology, Hubbard says, we don't close the door all the way. We leave it a crack open in case they want to come back in. But at the headquarters, there's a policy that he wrote specifically for the people that work at the international headquarters. If you leave from the headquarters, we bolt the door shut and weld it with an atomic branding iron.

So that person can never, ever be in Scientology ever again. If you escape from the international headquarters. And kids are a problem with that? You're not allowed to have kids if you're not allowed to have kids. in the Seahork. Oh, anyone who gets pregnant is forced to have an abortion,

which happened to me twice. It happened to you twice while we were at the International Lawyers. While we were married. Now, what was that like? I mean, that sounds like the worst nightmare of all time. It is absolutely

the worst nightmare of all time. The first time I was 19, I hadn't been being paid so I couldn't afford birth control. And from the moment I realized, oh, I missed my period. I had to go to the medical person and ask for pregnancy test. So immediately the cat's out of the bag, so to speak. And I'm told that I'm not even allowed

to have a conversation with Mark about it. So you didn't even know. And I mean, as I said, I had always wanted kids. And this was absolutely my worst nightmare. During our lawsuit, I made a list of all the women I personally knew who'd had been forced to have abortions. Some of them were required to have up to six abortions. And that list was 80 women long. It got so bad that the place that they were taking the women was like, hey, there's something weird here because you guys are bringing, the husbands are never there. The Riverside Family Planned Parenthood Clinic. You're bringing them here in a minivan.

So they're doing two or three women at a time. And they had to switch to another place because the place was like this. It was the place that was doing them. It was like, there's something wrong with this. We can't keep doing this. And if a woman even for a second didn't immediately comply, they'd be put on heavy manual labor and interrogated, separated from their husband, restricted to the property, like extreme measures. to convince them to do it. Yeah.

And in my case, I was 19. I knew that if I tried to fight it, I would lose my family, likely lose my husband, lose everything. And I thought about fighting it. And I just didn't feel that I was even mentally capable of fighting. But I was grilled on what to say, what to do. You know, six-foot Australian dude took me to the... planned parenthood clinic and waited there.

And the distinct memory I have from that was literally, you know, so the clinic staff are not Scientologists, obviously, they don't know what's going on. And one of the nurses, I had been grilled to say, or drilled, I should say, drilled to say, I don't want any pain medication. I don't want to talk to a psychologist, just go through with it. And one of the nurses looked at me and she said,

honey, where's your husband? And it just, in that moment, I was just like, oh my God, he's at work. You know, just, um, anyhow, in that moment, I was just destroyed, like completely and utterly. And in my mind, I remember also thinking, if this ever happens again, fuck these people, I'm done. I don't care what they put me through. I will not ever go through through with this again. But fast forward two years.

Now, had you shared that this happened? Yeah. I found out after it was already all done and Dustin. And when you found out, what was your thought? I was like, we can't, you know, it is what it is. We were, if we, we had seen there, there had been probably by that time, at least three or four couples that had that had gotten pregnant. And in almost every case, they were separated and they were both put on to manual labor at separate places. So they wouldn't see each other.

They couldn't game plan anything because they're not together. And it always ended up with either those people got disappeared. We don't know what happened to them if they kept the kid. and there's a policy if you leave the C-org in just any C-org location for having a baby, then you're supposed to get sent to a small failing Scientology organization. So one that can't pay their bills, can't pay their staff, is in a shitty strip mall somewhere. So they purposely put you in even a worse living situation so that you will have to struggle. It will, you know, I can either stay here and not have a kid or I can have a kid and also be on the struggle bus in the middle of nowhere where I don't have any family or support system or anything.

So it's a Sophie's choice. It's always a Sophie's choice in Scientology. There's no, there's only the lesser evil and the worst evil. There's never a good way out. It's always going to be shit somewhere or another. Again, how is that not, I don't understand how would accounts like you guys be in public how that's not prosecuted. Because it's part of their belief system that that's how you do it. And because they have.

It's completely illegal now. And they have all the best lawyers to protect them and using their taxes of women. Tax exempt dollars to protect an evil abusive organization. And yeah, so back to this, two years later, now I've been. moved into Religious Technology Center. I was sent to Clearwater, Florida. Mark is now in California, and I was in a meeting all day with David Miscavage coming in and out with 20 other people. He was railing on and on and on screaming about some whatever the latest flap of the day was, and I passed out. And I was carried out of that conference room,

into a bathroom and honestly to this day i don't know why what happened happened but somebody brought me a pregnancy test and i did it and it was positive and now i got just just to put it out there if you pull the goalie and i got michael phelps swimmers they're gonna that's gonna happen okay they're getting to the finish line oh my god That was the second time and now you know what happens though. Yeah. And that time I was, I never found out about that time. You never found out about that.

No, not until six months later the next time I physically saw him. I tried to, I put in a CSW completed staff work request to call Mark and it was disapproved. I was not allowed to even call him. They took you to Planned Parenthood and Clearwater? And you had said the last time that you'd never let this happen again, what, again, you're like a prisoner in an organization, so I'm not judging it. No, I know. Like, what's going through your head?

I mean, again, like how the heck did I end up here? By this time, I'm 21. You know, it's my husband. I love him, and I've always wanted children. It's soul-destroaring, you know. It just really is. like if I had one superpower, it would be determined back time on that fucking shit. It's just, you know, the only thing that brings me peace, not that I, you know, I've had to work through

a lot on this, but during our lawsuit, because forced abortion was one of the causes of action, it, like, we know many, many people who, because of that lawsuit, we're able to leave and have kids. Because they couldn't outlaw it anymore. They couldn't make the women do it anymore because now they're being accused of making women do this. So then they had to stop. The craziest thing is we help people with our foundation to get Seward members, help them get to safety. Aftermath Foundation. Michael J. Rinder, Aftermath Foundation. And so we've heard over the years, we're always being told, oh, this is happening or that's happening. Well, now they're not making the women do this, the dudes are all getting snipped. So it just doesn't happen in the first place.

So it's kind of wild. But that's like, I know. It's like, it's like the other side of a shitty coin. It's like, what? Now the dudes are having to go through a procedure. So it doesn't happen in the first place. But, yeah. And also, to be fair, she was also promoted to religious technology center. So now she's working directly with David Miscavage in Clearwater, a totally different organization than I'm working at. So we are only seeing each other if I happen to be going to Clearwater to put on one of these events or conventions that they have. And I might see her for one night in a year or in six months or in four months or whatever, whenever, if I happen to go and if I happen to see her when I'm there. So you're what, when this happens 21, the second one? So when you guys

do get a chance to talk about it six months later there's still no discussion of leaving no no because we were both really upset and mark asked me why didn't you tell me and yeah i was like i i tried tried um it's just not a conducive it's not a conducive environment for any sort of relationship right because you can't really trust the person all the time. They might rat you out. They think you might rat them out. Could you talk to anyone about, like, your emotional statement? No.

No. And that's what was so damaging about these beyond, you know, I was never even allowed to grieve that loss because doing so would have been considered a crime. A crime. Yeah. Like if I wanted a child, which of course I did, then that meant I wanted to leave. And that's a, that's, you know, a transgression. That makes me a suppressive person.

It's a suppressive act to talk about wanting to leave, even to your husband. So by that point, I was just so felt just completely stuck with no options. I mean, that really fucks with you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And this is what we're in mid-90s now? Yeah, 1996. Okay.

So you guys don't, you don't leave till 2005. Right. And you've already talked about like kind of the buildup and 04 and things like that. But let's, because now you guys have dealt with these. You found each other. That's great. But you've dealt with these awful traumatic kind of things that you have to compartmentalize, which is completely inhumane, like goes against human nature.

to have to do that. You continue serving the organization. You're very high up in it. In fact, you're higher than Mark is. Yeah, he had to call me sir. I need to call you sir. Mr. Headley. If I didn't call her sir. In the household too. No, not at home. Mr. Headley, let's go to bid. But if we were, yeah, that's a sentence that's never come out of a bill. When we would be in a meeting and somebody I would have to say like, oh, this happened. And they said, well, didn't somebody from religious technology come down here and talk to you? And I go, yeah, Mr. Headley came down there. That was kind of gay.

Hey, yeah. God damn it. What am I doing here? Mr. Headley is trans. Oh, man. So you guys go through this, though, and then 05. So in 05 in January of 05, I had a motorcycle.

I had it was legal. Now you got a bike. It was legal. I had one too, by the way. We had the same way. We both had Yamaha TW 200. So it's like a dual sport, big, big tires. You can drive it on the road. You can drive it on the dirt. Though in 1999, I broke my leg on a motorcycle. Almost lost my foot because they didn't call 911 because David Miscavage was on the property. I broke my tib-fib both bones right above my ankle. And they didn't call 911. Nope. And then it could be drugs, obviously. Nope. Not even type of. No.

So even, so the accident happened on the property. The security chief came and put a splint on my leg. And then they shoved me into the little red Honda and drove me to the hospital. And on arrival in the hospital, I was already in shock. So they rushed me into the ER. The doctors were, said, you know, why first of all they were super pissed like why didn't you call 9-1-1 because we're Scientologists right then the next thing that came was who put this splint on and I'm in

shock about almost potentially going to lose my leg but I couldn't say anything bad about Scientology so I just said I don't know it was Kevin Catano the security chief the same dude who's getting counseling from Tom Cruise and then didn't know how to rig a splint because of what they did because and because my My leg was completely broken. Like it was connected by muscle and tissue, and that was it. So because they'd put the wrong splint on it, it took them about four hours of testing

to see if I was going to lose my foot. Oh, my God. And then even the next day, so I had to go into surgery the next day. Oh, God, this was such a nightmare. The medical people were like, tell the doctor that you don't want general anesthetic, general anesthesia.

The Scientology Medicine. Yes, the Scientology, which they have no medical training. Don't let the title be confusing. They had talked to the doctor and the doctor said, yes, this surgery can be done with a spinal tap. So the medical staff told me you have to tell them to not give you general anesthesia. Tell them you want a spinal tap. And so by that point, Sunday morning, they're rolling me down the hallway to this operating room. And the anesthesiologist was this short, like, grandma-type lady. And I turned to her, I looked up with her and I said, can I please get the spinal tap?

I can't get general anesthesia. And she laid her hands on me. And she said, honey, you are in no condition to get the spinal tap. You cannot. I will take care of you. And I just let go at that point. I was just like. Did they find out about that?

Of course. Did you get locked in a room or something because of it? No, but it was something that I was, you know, punished for. And I had to do conditions and, you know, whatever. In Scientology, they have conditions of existence. And conditions above normal are good, normal, affluence, power, power change. And then they have conditions below non-existence.

And so if you do something. Treason is betrayal after trust. enemy, liability, confusion. Those are all come with, you have to do amends and you have to get people to let you back in the group and you have to do confessions and admit your sins and, you know, all this other sense. Yeah. So basically, if you get in trouble for anything, the first line of the Scientology justice is

you basically get knocked down a bunch of pegs and you got to work your ass off to get back into good standing. Gamification again. Yeah. And if you don't do that, then you could get what's called a court of ethics. And a court of ethics usually signs, amends, and things you have to do to make up the damage.

And then if that fails to turn you around, then you get a committee of evidence. And you can be taken off your post. You can be kicked out of the C-org. You can be declared a suppressive person. So there's always, there is always a response. If you do something you're not supposed to do, It might not come right now, but it's coming.

So what made you finally have the moment to where you couldn't even tell your wife what's happening, but you walkie-talkie, find out Claire's not coming home and you go, I'm getting the fuck out of here. Yeah. So they basically, I was doing a project for David Miscavage to design and identify every single audiovisual system for every single Scientology organization. So they have maybe in one organization, they might have 15 or 20 different systems for different parts of the organization, DVD playouts, film rooms to teach Scientology, training courses, all these different things. And I had gotten approval on maybe 75% of those. And I needed approval on the last 25%. And I had sent a proposal to David Miscavage, and he hadn't gotten it yet because the people on the way were holding it or were sort of. stalling or they didn't want to look at it.

They didn't want to get in trouble if they approved it or unapproved it. And so he wrote down and said, haven't gotten this proposal for Mark. If he's not working on that, what is he working on? And that's sort of like an invitation for the- For the police people at the Scientology police to dig in and figure out what he's got going and then serve him up on a platter. And so they basically figured out that, I was selling old 16 millimeter projectors

that were gonna be thrown away. I was selling them on eBay for insane prices. You were. I was. They were gonna, which he had approval to do. I got approval. I did a whole proposal to be able to sell these old. They were gonna throw them away.

They were like, what are we gonna do with 216. You're making more in one sale than you make in like fucking 10 years at Scientology. I sold so many. The projectors were really high-end, projectors at the time in 1980. Yeah. And they were still in the box, never opened, hundreds of them.

And there was this whole culture around playing old 16 millimeter films and, but people had to repair these old projectors to make them work. I had brand new ones in the box, never been opened. And I was selling the, they might have bought them for a few hundred bucks in the 80s. I was selling them for two, three, four thousand dollars on eBay. And I sold, I sold so many. But if in Scientology and the SeaR, you're not allowed to have a credit card for the organization. So I had a Wells Fargo debit card that I, my Wells Fargo account would have $50 in it.

Then I'd overdraft it. And then I'd have negative 45. And then I'd save up some money and I'd fill it back up so that I wouldn't overdraft. And then when I set this up, I said, hey, I need a credit card from you guys to be able to set up the account. And they said, no, no, we're not giving you any org credit card. use your own debit card or whatever. So I was like, okay. So I had like 30K in my account, in my PayPal account, from selling all this gear.

And when they were digging through my office doing this investigation, they found a receipt for a lens that I had sold for like 150, 300 bucks or whatever. And they were like, oh, we got the smoking gun. Where did this money go? I was like, I went into my PayPal account. They're like, you have an account that has organization money in it. And I was like, yeah, I got approval. I have a whole proposal.

It's all signed off by everybody for me to be able to fund these new design and projects with this old junk that we're throwing away. Anyway, they were like, it's done. You're going to the RPF. It's done. Which is their effective prison. Yeah. And I'll never see her because they don't, they disbanded the rehabilitation project force at the international headquarters. So you would have to go to Clearwater, Australia, or Los Angeles to do the rehabilitation.

I didn't mention, but the money that he had made, he had given to the organization. It's not like he had it sitting in his account, but they found that there were fees associated with it, but he hadn't included in his proposal. In my proposal, I didn't say, I'm going to sell something for 300 bucks. There's going to be an eBay fee and there's going to be a PayPal fee. So they're like, oh, you basically embezzled that money. Like not, went to the fees. It started at the time that this was happening, it started as, oh, you embezzled $250 of fees

that you didn't disclose and we didn't approve that. And he hadn't picked up his pay. So he went to go pick up his pay. And he was like, okay, here's the money. Here's $250. Here we're good. And they're like, nope, it's a financial irregularity. According to Elron Hubbard's words,

anyone who commits a financial irregularity, quote unquote, can what is it, join the walking dead. And the walking debt hadn't even come out of this. Wow. He's ahead of this time. This is in 1960s, he wrote this. Did the security guard say you're coming with us? Yeah, so basically I got interrogated.

And that was the night that he radioed me asking me if he, the next morning he was going to be sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force in LA. And I would never, and I would never see him again. And meanwhile, I hadn't been home, so I had no idea any of this was happening. I actually went. I was in the hole by then. Yeah, she was in this place called the whole. I had been kicked out of Religious Technology Center for refusing to divorce Mark.

Anyway, so I basically am. like I'm out. They make me pack up all my shit in my office, pack up all your stuff. You're never coming back here again. Whatever. They give all my files. They've ripped all my files. They took my PayPal card. They took my bank card. They took everything. So I didn't have access to the money anymore. And I was basically like, so I went and found, I woke up El Ron Hubbard's granddaughter who lived on the property. And her name was Roanne. Her name still is Roanne.

I knocked on Rowan's door and I said, hey, Roanne, I got a whole bunch of nonsense I'm dealing with. Can you spot me like two, three hundred bucks for a week or two? Because I got to sort this all out. And she's like, sure, she writes me a check. And then I went to the Treasury Department.

She gave you the money? Yeah, yeah. She had money. She had some money. She had some Hubbard money in there. She was our friend. She was our friend. She still is by good.

friend that she's escaped since then and she's good for her yeah but there's another she comes up she comes up a little a few days later in this story but um when i got the money from her but i had to cash it so it wasn't really good to any use to me i guess i could have endorsed it but either way i went to the accounts department i said hey i haven't picked up my pay in forever can i get my pay and i had a whole bunch of back weeks of pay and also my sister had some back weeks of pay they gave it to you it's like you're going to jail, buddy. No, no, they don't know. It's all siloed.

They don't know. You also went to my office. I went to her office, went through her post, took all her cash. So by the time the morning... By the time the morning comes along, I've got like three, four hundred bucks in my pocket and this check. So I go on my... I have a motorcycle. I was not allowed.

I had been restricted to the property for a really long time. So I wasn't even allowed to go to where we lived together. I had to sleep under my desk at the property. Under your desk. Yeah. For months. Because I wasn't allowed to go home because I was a cut down there? No, just like fucking the floor.

Got a shoe maybe or something you can make a pillow out of. Maybe a roll of paper towels that hasn't been unwrapped. That's comfortable. Yeah. I've done that before. Anyway, I have horrible back problems now. It might be because I slept under my desk maybe four or seven hundred times. But so I get the,

my bike has been sitting in the garage at this house that we live right next to the property. We live right outside the gates of the property in a house with like 10 other RTC people that work with her. And the motorcycle was sitting in the garage and nobody knew that's where the motorcycle was. It's just been sitting in there. Because if you're at the property and they think you're going to escape, they lock up your bike. Like they chain it up so you can't get out. But they didn't know my bike was at the house.

And they said, you can go home, but you're going to get interrogated tomorrow and then you're going to go to the RPF. So I was like, okay, fine. So before I leave, because I had set up this whole base network, I went into David Miscavage's personal server and downloaded hundreds and hundreds of pictures of him and Tom Cruise doing all kinds of bromancy shit all over the place. And I put it on a fucking drive. And I'm like, this is a fucking little insurance package I'm putting together here. so they don't fuck with me. Anyway, and because I had access to the whole entire base network, no one would ever think that somebody could do that.

So I get those, I put those on a thumb drive, grab all the cash together. I walk home, and as I'm walking home, I actually end up walking with another RTC person. And so when I walk out the gate, sometimes if you go to go out the gate, they'll be like, you can't go home. They won't come back here.

I'm not going to buzz you out. But because she was with me, I let her just be like five feet ahead of me when the gate got opened. And as soon as they opened it for her, I just jammed through there, walked. And then I walked the rest of the way down the road with her to her house. And then I went to my house. And then that's when I call Claire, hey, are you coming home? It's like two, three o'clock in the morning now.

No, I don't know. We'll see. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. So I get all my stuff together. I put it in a super old 1982 suitcase that I had. I put it on the strap it, bungee cord it to the back of the bike that's in the garage. And then I'm waiting for her and I fall asleep. And so now I wake up in the morning.

It's like about 9 o'clock. So they've already had the morning mustard at 8.30 and I wasn't there. You overslept. I just passed out. So I just overslept. I didn't even. I just overslept anyway. And then there's a bang on the door and it's security.

And they're like, hey, what the fuck? And I was like, oh, I was told I needed to be sessionable. I had to sleep enough to come in and be able to be put on the meter. You're supposed to sleep enough to be able to do that. And because I'd gone to bed at three, I was like, hey, I was going to come in at lunch. They're like, fuck that. You're coming in right now. We don't give a shit about your sleep.

Get your ass to the property. And so I'm like, okay, fine. So then I close the door. I get my shit together. And I go to the bike. I open up the garage and I just jam out of there. Well, the security. SUV is parked next to our house on the road. So as soon as I'm jamming out of there, they're like,

oh, we got a runner. And so they're following me within 10 seconds of my escape. They're like, oh, we're on them. And as we're driving down the road, I'm trying to get to Hemet. Are you terrified? I'm completely losing my mind because as soon as I jam out of there, I look at my rear view and I'm like, oh, you got to fucking be kidding me. They're already on me. I'm not even getting a head start. Anyway, they, they, as we're driving into San Yacento, the road narrows and there's like some farms and there's some dirt roads next to it and there's fences where these farms are. They basically just get next to me. They're like, dude, you got to come back.

They're yelling at the window. You got to come back. You got to come back. Can't do this. It's not going to end well. And I'm like, fuck you. I'm out. I'm going.

I don't give a shit. And they basically just ran me off the road with the SUV. I crashed. My suitcase is out. Fucking bikes fucked up. And when that happened, somebody driving by called 911. And they said, hey, there's a whole bunch of guys fighting on the side of the road with some guy on a motorcycle that they just crashed. There's a copy of the police report from that in his book.

Yeah. Wow. And they have a scanner, a police scanner in the security SUV. So they, that person calls the police. Dispatcher says, hey. incident on this road with this SUV with a bunch of guys and this motorcycle with one guy. And meanwhile, they're in the middle. They took the key out of my bike.

So I couldn't even try to get it going again. And I'm like, give me my fucking key. And they're like, no, Mark, you got to come back. You got to come back. Call goes out on the scanner. They hear that. They throw me the fucking key. And they whip it back to the property.

Whoa. And so then I'm like, I don't know what happened. I just know that they gave me the key back. And they just took off like crazy. And I'm like, okay. The clutch broken off. The clutch levers broken off. So I have to bump start it.

And the carburetors completely flooded from it flipping upside down and crashing. I get it going, but it only goes like five miles an hour. I'm literally just idling on the road with cars behind me. And then I see this cop come and flip it and then pull me over. And he comes up and I'm like, oh, my. my God, I'm so fucked. This is like the worst thing that could happen because now I'm burned. I'm dead because now the police are getting involved. That's like the ultimate sin to get the police involved with the Scientology matter. So I'm like, oh my God, please, please, please. I don't want to,

I just want to get out of here. And the cop says, where are you trying to get to? And I said, I'm just going into town. And he goes, we had a report of an incident that happened a little bit back on the road with an SUV and a vehicle that matches your description. And I'm like, oh, no, I'm just trying to see my dad. And they wanted, they were asking me some stuff. They wanted to find out some stuff before I took off. And then he goes back to the car and he runs my ID. And it's got the property address on my driver's license. And so he's like, oh, this is, the police know people escape from there all the time. And they get hunted down like animals. So they know about that. They know they're clued in of what's going on.

Yeah. Well, they get sometimes when I was on the night shift, I'd see the cops hanging out with the main booth security guards. The guards would buy donuts for the cops and they'd hang out and have a little donut party. Donuts and pizza will get you a lot in Scientology. In this story, they're the good guys. Yeah. Anyway. So the cop runs my ID.

He comes back and he goes, dude, where are you trying to get to? I'll help you get there. I just need to know where you're trying to go. And I said, I'm trying to get to U-Haul in San Y Santo so I can put my bike in the back of a truck and drive off and be gone. And he goes, okay, good. I'm going to call another car and we'll escort you to the U-Hull. Wow.

So I'm just waiting there. We're talking. The other car comes. As soon as we start driving again, I still can only go five miles an hour because the fucking car is just destroyed. And I don't, and I can't shift without going, more faster. So I'm like first or second gear. I'm just like, and they're literally just following me. And while that's happening,

somebody from the property, the public relations director from the property and the legal director from the property are following the cops. And the cop and back pulls. The cop and back pulls over one of them and says, what the hell? Oh, no. When we were stopped, when the cop was trying to figure out what was going on, the PR director pulls up. next to us on the road and she goes what's the matter with mark and the cop's like you know this gentleman and she's like yeah and he goes that's when he figured it out he goes oh because he knew her because she's they have police they have events with the police and town all the time to safe point the Scientologist from the town he's like this bitch is messing with he's like oh this they're trying to get him

yeah and so then we get the other cop anyway then the legal director she has to pull away because he's like no no you're you're fine go drive a along. You're interfering with my investigation right now. Move along. So then while we're driving, I can see the cops because we're going so slow and they're right before and after me. I can see them talking or motioning to each other. And now I look back and the other person from Golden Era, the legal director, he's following. So they pull him over. And this is all in this police report. Yeah. And so then they pull him over. Then the cop joins back in. to follow me and the guys in front, we get to the U-Haul, and I'm like, thanks, guys.

They're like, are you fucking kidding me? In the two miles that we had to drive, two people tried to intercept you with us escorting you. And I'm like, okay. And they're like, you know, we're not leaving until you're in the fucking truck driving away. So they hang out with me at U-Haul. I call my dad. He's now in Kansas City by this time. He says, I'll get you a plane ticket.

I'm like, what about my bike? He's like, fuck your bike. Just dump that somewhere. And I'm like, well, like the only thing I own is this bike. When was the last time you had talked to your dad? Probably a year or two before that, maybe here and there. I would call him. His dad had a 1-800 number that he set up just for Mark and his sister.

To be able to call. To be able to call if they ever needed anything. And we, whenever he would see us, he was like, you remember the 800 number, right? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. This is out of like a fucked up movie in every way. Anyway, so then we get to the U-Haul. I get the bike, roll the bike in the back of the U-Haul, strap it up.

I get in the U-Haul. I'm going to drive to L.A. I'm going to drive to L.A. My dad's wife's friend lives there. I'm going to dump the bike at her apartment building. I'm going to get on a plane and I'm going to fly back to Kansas City. It's January, and it's one of the biggest snowstorms they've had. in that area is is happening that time in kansas city in kansas city and Denver anyway so then um

i go to wells fargo i get the u-hall first stop wells fargo got to cash this uh roanne hubbard check okay get that and then um i go to the i stay with the lady how did i do that i stay i go to the lady dump off the bike and then I go return the U-Haul. She picks me up from the U-Haul place and then takes me to LAX. My dad buys me a ticket, but there's no flights landing in Kansas City. So my flight is canceled. Now, Scientology has their own travel agency. That is a C-org member. They can look up any flight on any airline and see who's where and what. So all they... The manifest? They can see every they don't know the um they don't see the first name but they can see the last initials of the name of the last name and they know who they're looking for so they can easily go doda doda

oh m a ga that's our guy so i'm thinking they're going to get me at the airport but the flight gets canceled and a bunch of flights get canceled and also there's no way for me to get from hemit to the lax there's no way for me to do that with the bike because the bikes totally tits up. So I don't know if they think I'm going there or if they think I'm at a hotel locally. I don't know what they think, but I don't, they don't find me at LAX and then I end up going to like,

they give me a voucher to go like across the street of the Sheraton or some shit for, because of my flight got canceled and I'm stuck in the airport. And I literally, I had whatever cash I had, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to eat something. I haven't eaten a single thing this whole entire day. I go into this share tonight. I order a burger and a drink.

And the woman brings the food. The waitress brings the food. And she says, do you want another refill on your drink? I'm like, sure. In the time that it took her to go refill the thing and come back, the burger's gone. And she literally looked at me like, are you okay, sir? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. She goes, you literally ate a giant hamburger and ate.

seconds. That's crazy. And I was like, oh, fuck. I'm like, I'm not, I got to learn, I got to learn how to eat again. Like, I can't just go. That's how you guys would eat. Oh, it was literally, because we had 15 minute meal breaks for many, many years. And like I said, you got to do all the logistics of getting the food. So if you don't eat in five minutes, you're fucked. Anyway, so then. If you even have dining purpose. I stay in a hotel that night. I sleep like the best sleep I've ever slept in my life. at that by this time in a bed you did yeah it was amazing and then it's like i wake up and i'm like okay it's back on because they can intercept me at any point i would have been sleeping with one eye open and telling me claire is um she wants you to come back oh you're not going to get whatever the

story are you worried about repercussions against claire though no no i'm not worried about fuck all with her because I'm trying to get the fuck out of there. It's like, no. But also, I know it's going to be easier for me to maybe get her out when I'm gone. If there's any chance of getting her out, I will have more resources now that I'm on the outside than I would have had on the inside. So I go. I end up with my dad picks me up from Kansas City. We go home.

And then I'm like, okay, I'm here. And for two or three weeks, I basically slept. My dad worked for Dell. He was a computer technician. And he traveled all over the United States just upgrading banks and Walmarts and just whole computer systems. And he had a side hustle where he fixed people's computers. And he had a whole stack of people's computers that he had to fix. And I was like, can I do this?

I know how to do computer stuff all day every day. I can do this. He was like, sure. Anyway, I end up stealing all of his clients that he had fixing stuff and I get a pizza restaurant. And in two weeks, I'm making $50 an hour. I'm making more. I mean, for you. I'm making more in one hour than I made in a whole goddamn week.

So I'm like, what the fuck? And sleeping and eating. I ain't flipped one burger and I'm fucking slaying it here. He hasn't thought about Claire in a week. No. And I always tell her. I always tell her like, lost her. Right before, right before, so they changed her phone.

Oh, and also, the phone that I had was a Nextel, but it was my personal phone. David Miscavage gave it to me for Christmas a fucking, a week earlier. He gave me this Nextel phone. Thanks, Dave. And so it was my phone. So I kept it. And I, but I turned it off because I knew they're going to call me full time. So I just took the battery.

I was doing, by the way. I took the battery out. But then they changed her phone number. So I tried to call her phone number and it wasn't in service because they changed, swapped out her phone number. So I wouldn't be able to get a hold of her. Are you worried that they were taking Claire to the prison in your place? No, because she didn't do anything.

And we never spoke about it. So she's basically, she doesn't know what happened. And they also told, I don't know this at the time, but, so she didn't. doesn't know. So I don't think she's going to get in trouble. If anything, I've unburdened her because she's in trouble because she's married to me. Now I'm the fuck out of there. She should be golden again. And it sucks and it's shitty. But I'm like, I'd rather be dead than fucking stay at that place. That's where I was at. I was basically like, if I go to the rehabilitation project force, I'm never going to see her again anyway. So that decision's already been...

That's a, that decision's already been made for me. I'm never going to see her again, no matter what. We're done. So at least I'm going to leave on my terms and fucking do my life and not be fucking in L.A. scrubbed dumpsters for the rest of my time. So her sister is not really in Scientology that much. Her oldest, her younger sister that's the oldest of the two. And she went to college or whatever. Claire calls her on her new phone. It says, hey, can you get a message to Mark? He's on a project. And I need to get a hold of him. And I had a hotmail account forever. And it was always like a never told Scientology I had this account. The only reason I even knew you had that hotmail account is because you sent me a text. Yes, from the from the hotmail account.

That was what you were using a song for porn home. No. Match.com. Anyway, Anyway, so I tell, she tells her sister to message me on this email with her new phone number. And I get this and I'm like, what the fuck? Took me two weeks to figure out how to get him a message. Yeah, but then I'm like. I figured it out. But then I'm like, this seems legit. Meaning like it's not a trap.

It's not a trap. I don't think it's a trap because she's got her sister doing it. Her sister's not in Sea Org. That's super, super not something that you would bring. It wouldn't be sanctioned at all. There's no way you would bring a green person into this crazy espionage session. That's not, that doesn't just do that. So as soon as I get that, I'm like, okay, I'm going to call her.

And as soon as I call her, she's like, oh, they're saying they're going to get you back. And that Dave has got the police people got. got in trouble for even even messing with you. You're the only person who's getting anything done. You did all those other designs. It's all going to be worked.

You're going to get all the money you need, all the personnel. You're going to get everything. This whole thing is a giant fuck up. And I'm thinking, uh, I've fucking been sleeping and fucking eating burger. And this is all bullshit.

I'm, when you're there and you're constantly working, eating, trying to sleep. not getting any sleep being yelled at you're just in robot mode you sleep for a week and you're just it all just goes the fog wears off and you're just like well fuck those fucking fuckers isn't it weird though like you're out in the real world now and it's just a week and you're like yes i'm eating yes i'm sleeping that's subjectively great you're making tons of money but you're like what the

it is weird existential it is it's it's kind of like you don't you're like you don't jumped into somebody else's life. Yes. Like you jumped out of the Truman show. You jumped out of that and now, but now I don't know, I don't have any, I have work skills and I have people skills, but I don't have real world skills. I don't, like, I got to pay for a phone. What the fuck?

How much is that? Oh my God. That's the cheapest piece of shit in Nokia. They want 80 bucks a month for that. Damn, you know, like I'm like, okay. It's my yearly fellow. Yeah. I'm going to have to save up for two years to get that flipper.

That razor. That's a sweet little number there. Anyway, so. You're like, what is the Iraq war? Yeah. Well, we knew a little bit. But anyway, so then we... Imagine they make them enlist.

Like, you're going to Iraq, buddy. That was 100. No, no. That was 100% an option that I was thinking of. I'll join the military. But I was 32. And I don't have a high school diploma. You have to have a high school diploma to join the military.

That's one of the requirements. So I was like, fuck. And I'm really fucking bad with the school stuff. I mean, I think really at the end of the day, algebra is what made me join the Cork. Because I was like, I'm never going to crack. You didn't fuck with algebra? No. All the computers and cameras you're fixing.

I know. Fuck with algebra. I know. But I was like, I can't. I'm not like my, I don't have enough bandwidth to be able to work on this. and why what am I going to use it for? So I was like, damn. Anyway, I went to my wife, my dad's wife said,

you need to go to this place. They'll give you a test and they'll find out what you could do based on what you know. Like a, I don't know, a job placement place. And they test you and then you say, they say, oh, you can do this. Anyway, they fucking told me to fucking kick dirt because I was too fucking. fucking smart for any of the fucking bullshit they're sending people to. And I was like, well, wait a minute. I can't get a job if I don't have a GED, but I'm too smart to get a job with these guys. And most of the people there were like English as a second language and stuff like that.

It wasn't a lot of male Caucasians in the job placement place when I went in Kansas City, at least. Anyway, so then we start talking again. And she's like, I'm like, well, you got to get out of there. when and Sunday morning you get a few hours to to clean your room and do stuff like that. I'm like, just call a fucking cab to the to that place on Sunday morning. And that easy. Well, yeah, it's going to say. Now you have to say what happened. Yeah.

So I said, well, no, because I'm restricted to the property. I'm not allowed to go home. I had to sleep on the floor of my office with a sleeping bag. Oh, they at least gave me a sleeping bag. Yeah. Well, she was in the executive. Right. No, by now, I was not in RTC anymore.

I was busted into the hole. Still, Mr. Headley to me. Mr. Headley. And, you know, I had already by this time gone through my own version of hell. I lost like 30 pounds. I weighed less than 100 pounds, like 20 pounds less than I weigh now. I was literally like completely emaciated, just really, really messed up. And of course, the moment he took off, I initially they were going to take me out on the highway to bring him back.

But then they told me he'd called 911. He'd gone to the dark side. He called the police. That's what they call it in Scientology when you leave. They call it the dark side. You've gone to the dark side. Yeah. Just throw a little.

A clear side. No, just throw a little Star Wars in there. I was fucking doing some Vader fucking shit. Yeah. And I was immediately like, what the heck? My entire world just went up in flames with him gone. And that same night, I was like, I'm out of here. I packed a bag and hid it under my bed the day he escaped.

But then they, by like two days after, when they didn't get him back immediately, that's when they wouldn't let me go home at all anymore. I had to sleep on the floor of my office. Oh, and also the thumb drive with all the pictures left it on the ironing. Oh, no. Left it on the Ironin. All the Tom Cruise files.

All of it. Snowmobiling in Alaska, scuba diving in Bonner, Aruba, Currasow. Scotland. On the sailboats in England, in the Real Madrid with Beckham, Tom and Beckham in the stadium, watching football, all of it.

on the ironing board, which to me, I think, if they found that... Do you know how much you could have sold that for? But they found it, but I could have gotten big trouble, too. Wow. Well, because those are their property. They weren't naked. Well... No.

But they probably would have tried to suit... Well, yeah, yeah. I didn't like that ball. Well, I was like, well, not in all of pictures. I don't like that pause. Anyway, they could have... I think they could have jacked me up if I actually did. did take that.

Because the only things I ended up taking were my own things. Yeah. But I, but I always, but I went through all my shit like, what the fuck? And then I was like, they had somebody arrested 10 years later for taking files. For having a hard drive. They don't mess around with that kind of stuff. But yeah. So, um, so I figured out how to get a message to Mark through my sister without telling her

anything. Um, and then Mark says, so just call a cab. And I'm like, well, easy for you to say, but I'm locked up. And he said, so what's your plan? So I had already, I knew all the ways people had tried to escape from that place. They'd made lists of all the people who had escaped from the property over a 15, 20 year period. And so she knew every single way any person had ever escaped from the property. So given that I was in really bad physical shape, emotional shape, and everything else,

I knew I had to come up with a plan that wouldn't involve them intercepting me because physically they could easily overcome me and had done so with people in the past that I knew of. So the idea that I came up with is I waited until David Miscavage had gone to Clearwater, Florida, in January for the Fort Harrison Gala that they did to woo the local. How many months later is this? So, no, this is three weeks later. Three weeks after I left. Yeah.

So I had made an eye doctor appointment, which was at the Walmart in Hemet. And normally how that would go is the medical staff would drive you to the appointment, drop you off, and then come back two hours later to pick you up. So I thought, okay, that gives me a two-hour head start. Well, I had to, so I had an eye doctor appointment for 1015, January 24th, 2005, which ironically is the also happens to be the anniversary of El Rone Hubbard's death, though I didn't realize that at the time. That's a biblical shit.

Realize that. Just like you starting on March 13th. Yep. Yeah. You told me that off camera. I own March 13th on that. There you are. Much better.

Much better. We'll rename it. Anyhow. So I had to get approval to go to the eye doctor. appointment the night before I wrote it wrote it up and they say well you can go but you have to have a security escort you can't go like normal so somebody would be would be driving me to the Walmart coming in with me to the appointment coming into the appointment yes what do they say when they come in they don't say anything it's my friend yeah they do it all the time they do they have people go to

their parents funerals and they got a minder with them yeah it's like who's this this susie it's like how long you guys been working for each other. We're like, we don't. I don't even know her. She's just here to make sure I don't skedat. I had this guy Lee sitting in that chair last year who escaped North Korea. And we talked about it on that podcast, the similarities to Scientology. But it's the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. So you go into this appointment with your weird security guard guy. But no, it's a girl. It's a woman. And it's a woman. And it's a girl that works for her.

It's her junior. Oh. But she's twice my size. You can easily overcome me. Anyhow, we pulled, oh, and so also that morning, I had the Nextel phone radio thing. So I had gone at 6 o'clock that morning. I went into a closet and called a local cab company and scheduled a cab for 1015 at Walmart under the name Barbara Smith.

And I had $200. So I specifically was like, how much would it be for a cab from Walmart to the Riverside County bus station? And they said, $90. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to be basically halfway through my funds before I even make it out of the county. But whatever, I knew that that's why I had, you know, gone through every option and knew that I had to have Mark's help to escape. And I told her, as soon as you get in the county, you know, cab turn off your phone take the battery out turn off your phone

when you get to riverside bus station there will be a ticket there for you that will take you to barstow which is the opposite direction of Kansas City you're going to go to barstow too fast two furors like we're going to barstow way the fuck out there so I say go to barstow

and in barstow we're going to get you a ticket to go to Kansas City so if they are kind of if they're catching up to you we're going to throw them off that you're going the wrong direction to come visit me. But so the security escort has already thrown a wrench in the works because somehow I have to ditch the escort. So as it happened, so it's 10.15, we're pulling into the parking lot.

She didn't immediately see a parking space. I'm looking over and at, you know, the entrance exit to, I look over there's the cab. So I said, hey, just let me out up front. It's 10.15. I'll go into my appointment while you park. and she went for it. So she let me out of the car at the front. I walked in.

I walked in and I didn't want to run because I'm completely paranoid that I know that like in my mind is like playing out like a movie. Like the PIs are going to be running after me. Have you seen this girl? You know, my hair was down past my butt. Your hair was that long? Yeah. Yeah. So I knew that.

And super red. Yeah. So I. So I, you know, look, I knew it would have stuck in someone's memory. So I just walked as fast as I could, walked out the door, got in the cab, and the guy looks at me, he's like, Barbara Smith. I'm like, yep, that's me, let's go. So he's driving out of the parking lot. I'm waiting for Mark to call, and my radio goes off.

It's the security escort. And she's like, where are you? I'm like, oh, I just went to the bathroom. I'll be right there. I'm like. And the cab driver. He's, she's right there. Yeah, I'm like, he's looking at me like, I've lost my marbles.

I'm in the bathroom right now. He's like, you better not be. He's probably seen some crazy shit in Pakistan. Yeah. And then two minutes later, Mark calls. And I'm like, okay, good. There's a ticket for you. Turn off your phone.

Yeah. Because otherwise, because they have all the setup there at the property. They can just type in the number and see where it's pinging from. But here's where it gets really crazy. Like, we haven't gotten there yet. So I get to Barstow and he had told me to call him to get the ticket number to go to Kansas City. But from a pay phone? From a pay phone.

Like, do not. You turn the phone on? Yeah. So I panicked because I couldn't find any payphone that took coins. They only took calling cards. And I'd never heard of a calling cards were. I don't know what that is. I had no idea what it was.

and I panicked. So I turned my phone back on and I called him. And the first thing he said was, oh my God, why are you calling from the phone? I'm like, I'm sorry. I panicked. I, I, uh, anyhow. So this is Barstow. He gives, he's like, okay, well, once we're done talking, do not turn it back on again. They'll track you down. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know. So I get the ticket. I get on the bus. So now, by now, so 10, 10.15 a.m. that Monday is when I started my escape. By now, it's like 1 p.m. And the bus I'm getting on to now from Barstow is going to Vegas. And then in Vegas, I have to change buses, which will be around 6.30 p.m.

So I get on the bus from Barstow. I'm like, okay, I'm good now. We get to Vegas. It's dark. You know, I'm, again, conscious of my long hair and everything else. I'm like, I'll just wait until everybody else has gotten off the bus. and then I'll get off and I'm looking. I'm like, God, there's a McDonald's right there. I could afford a cheeseburger. Hadn't eaten in days, literally. I had, I was surviving on protein bars.

And so I go to get off the bus and I go to open the door of the station and boom, there's four people there from the base. Six foot Greg Wilhair, Sharon Johnston and two other people and two more people in a car out. outside that I never even saw. How do you get away from it? Right. I know. I was literally just like, oh my God. But I knew that I wasn't.

So anyway, what I did was I walked into the bus station because I thought, well, at least if I'm in the bus station, they can't force me into a car. Or if they try to drag me out of here, I could scream and hopefully somebody might help me. I put my purse down on the floor in the middle of the bus station and just sat down. And the next 45 minutes was hell. They tried every trick in the book that, you know, I was destroying my family and da-da-da-da. They even called Mark and got him on the phone.

Yeah. So in Kansas City, they called me on my phone that I've never given them. They found out your name. I had a totally new phone and they called me on that phone. How fuck did they do that? helps when you got somebody that works at Verizon. It helps when you fucking work for the CIA. Anyway, so they called me and said,

we have Claire and we're bringing her back to the property. And if you want to ever see her again, then you better get your ass back here too. And that was it. And then they told me. I literally almost destroyed the fucking phone. I'm walking outside on the sidewalk outside my dad's house. And it's dark in Kansas.

city by this time. It's like eight o'clock. Eight o'clock at night. It's dark and there's snow everywhere and I'm like, motherfoot goddial. I almost got it. And it was because she turned the fucking phone on in Barstow. And so they knew she's definitely going to see. They must have looked in her call log and they saw the number that she called. That's how they got my number. Did you have an area code for Kansas City area? Yeah, A13 or whatever it was. A16. Anyway, so then they know she's going to Kansas City, probably, and they know she's got to go through Vegas. Because you can just go on Greyhound. You can look up the schedule.

You can find it. Those buses do run pretty close to on time. So they tell me... Not in Atlantic City. Well, not Greyhound? No. That's not bad experiences with that. Please continue.

Anyway, so they tell me, we've got her. We've met her in Vegas. We're getting her some food, and we're going to take her back to the property. And I'm just like, and you're sitting in the middle of the bus station. Are they like sitting on the floor with you? No, they're just standing there talking to me. And they're like, come, come get some food. We'll talk about this.

And believe me, when you haven't eaten in days, that sounds really goddamn appealing. And I was just like. Are people looking at you though? Like, you're sitting on the floor of a bus station and there's weird people talking. We might get it. I think we were getting some strange side eyes, which is why I hoped like, hey, if they do try to lay hands on me and drag me out of here physically, which they have done before, then maybe if I scream, I'll be okay. But I just knew that I had to stay in a populated area and just stick

to my guns and somehow make it on the next bus. They told me that he was coming back. And I just was like, I had to kind of figuratively plug my ears and not listen to their shit. And, just know that if I didn't, because there was not a doubt in my mind that if I failed and if they got me back, I would never see him again. I didn't have a doubt of that for one second. So, um, so then I made it through. I got on the bus. They threatened to follow me on the bus, but I knew that, um, anyway, they didn't do that. They didn't do that. No. So the minute I got, got on the next bus, I turned on my phone and called Mark.

And I'm like, where are you? And she's like, I made it. I made it. I'm on the bus. I'm like, oh, my God, they told me they got you back. And she's like, they told me they got you back. And I was like, those fucking guys. Yeah.

Anyway, so then she showed up in Kansas City a day and a half later. And you're like, let's restart a life. Yeah. And the best thing that happened, which is kind of a wraps it all up, is we're sitting there and we're wondering, and what are we going to do? And she goes, you know what? I could make spaghetti bolognese. And I said, you know how to cook?

We had been married for 13 years. 13 years. You'd never cooked. And she had never cooked once. And so, and I didn't even know she knew how to cook. Yeah. I was like, you guys knew what spaghetti bolognaz was? Yeah, she did.

She had a Fannie Farmer cookbook. Yeah. In all those hours of babysitting my siblings, I read Fannie Farmer cookbook, cover to cover. Outside Scientology. Yes. Yes, right. Yes. I feel like they didn't even have a Sabaros in Scientology.

Oh, no way, dude. We had a thing where when we would do film shoots, we would get the food would be pre-made at the property. And if we had a shoot that we had to do at a location or something, they would just give us trays of cold cuts and stuff to bring to LA or wherever we were doing a location shoot. And there would be, we would call it sweaty beef, or sweaty cheese and rainbow beef,

because it would be sitting out in the sun so long that the meat would become iridescent and the cheese would start sweating. And that was like, that was a five-star lunch in the Seahawk. But something, you sitting on the floor waiting that out in a foreign place, literally, like, everything's foreign to you. Yeah. In a middle of a public place, while the thought police are basically trying to threaten you with everything.

They're pinning you guys against each other, calling you. You don't know how long this is going to last. you're trying to figure out you're going to get on that bus. You know, it sounds like it was just the thought of not just escaping, but like the love for each other that somehow was able to actually really exist from all those years being in Scientology and being brainwashed. You guys had some sort of real true human love connection that got you onto that bus. And then when you made it to Kansas City, you're like, I have no idea what we're doing, but we're going to figure it out because we just accomplished the hardest part. was literally, it was almost surreal when she arrived in Kansas City. I have likened it to me in that moment. I would say the only comparison I could make would be like being told, hey, go jump off

that cliff. I promise you, Mark is at the bottom. Everything's going to be okay. You just have to do it. that is in that moment what it felt like to me. And honestly, you know, every moment of my life up until that point should have meant that I failed in, you know, the level of programming, the level of indoctrination from four years old, that was the only life I'd ever known. And I just had to trust in my love for this man and that it was going to be okay.

And I did know. that she wanted to have kids. So when she was talking to me saying, they're trying to get you back, I was like, babe, I'm sleeping, I'm making tons of money. We could start a family. We could do this.

We could do this. No problem. I've been out a week. I've been rolling in the world. Yeah, I have, man. It's this one lady's computer that she owns a pizza restaurant. I mean, I'm talking about.

big, deep clients here. But it's funny how they, you know, we, we are very familiar with the decompression that goes on when you get out of a life like that, an environment like that. And sleep and food really accelerate that process. And since leaving, we have helped other people leave. And we just a few years ago, we almost did the same thing that we did with each other. we've done it with other Seorg members where they're in the Seahorg when they call us.

We broke someone out from the headquarters. How are you, how are these not movies? I mean... Just because of Tom Cruise? A lot of people ask that. In fact, we were talking about Sarah Edmondson. She just put out a book a little bit culty, navigating coercive control.

Sarah's amazing. So this story that we're telling you right now is in there and she says in the book, will someone please make this a movie just don't cast Tom Cruise or Michael Pena or yeah I'd be okay with like Jeremy Renner

playing me yeah I can see that someone someone just recently suggested McKenna Grace whose car we take him whose car no which one oh from the town

yeah the town we can never talk about it we're gonna some people going to get hurt. Anyway, yeah. But then when we... Plus, we take him. There you go.

But when we help these other people, we know exactly what they're going through. And we are probably... There's not a huge amount of people in the world that do. Yeah. So when we talk to them, we're like, we understand what you're going through. And we don't...

We're not going to tell you anything what you have to do. but if you want to leave, we can help you leave. And if you want to live in the outside world, we can help you do that. We can help you do. We can help you get a job. We can help you get your GED. We can help you. Whatever you need, we can sort of help you and point you in the right direction so that you're

not just on your own when you leave. We have a support group that we can kind of, that'll help. And we have donors and we have volunteers. We have a huge network all over the world. We've helped people get out of Australia, England. We've helped people. Can somebody in the federal government watching this right now,

just please take this to the nearest court, prosecutors, something, and just review this data, read the fucking books. I know you got another book, you got your own book coming, Claire. Like, can we do something? This is crazy.

I've done, I now am going to have after this, what do we have, 14 hours on camera, ready of Scientology testimony. This is going to be another. We just did six and a half so far on this. Now I have over 20 hours of episodes for you guys to see all the fucking people that have been fucked up by this. All these other podcasts have done podcasts on Scientology. Like, I don't understand why this isn't taken care of it. It's crazy. It is crazy. And it's, and that's, that affects the people that are trying to escape. Exactly. But it's awesome that you're helping

them. Well, we're trying as much as we can. And like I was saying earlier, They don't, they're not growing. Their membership is not growing. Right. And more recently, they have, it looks like they've isolated that they're also losing the children of Scientologists. Good. So they've- Except that they just launched a new program targeting children from age seven.

They've made all of Elron Hubbard's books. They dumped them down and animated them for kids so that kids can learn about overts and withholds and suppresses. Like, despite all the testimony that has been given about the abuses of Scientology, as of March, they are actively launching a new campaign targeting children. Well, unfortunately, our DOG is not great at targeting human trafficking. So they don't have a very good recent reputation of that. Well, even the other thing is the attorney general has the former attorney general.

Oh, she was tied into Scientology. She has done events in the Clearwater facilities, and she's doing these things where John Travolta's coming and dancing with the other politicians. She also is not too bright. That didn't help. Yeah. So they have, they, they're not unaware of the things they know they can get lit up for, but they're doing everything they can to sort of safe point anybody who could possibly be the ones

lighten them up. So they're kind of, at this point, there's not a lot of people doing Scientology training and processing. It's just a lot of people giving money to Scientology to raise their status, just giving them 10, like Nancy Cartwright, the one who does Bart Simpson's voice. She's giving them over $20 million. That's Simpson's money's going to Scientology. This guy who invented a big drug, big pharma guy, him and his wife. Bob Duggan. Bob and Trish Duggan.

She's the one who is a big donor with the current administration. And how much are they given like a hundred million dollars to Scientology or something crazy? 300 million, I think, between the two of them. From pharma too, which Scientology is going to do. Right. The craziest thing. Money green, as they say. Yep.

Yeah. How did you guys, like you guys clearly have like an unbelievable marriage and you ended up building a family and everything? How did you translate that though to the real world? because you don't know what that's like. You've only known it in dystopia. And we were talking off camera. We know all the stories of people. And I totally understand this.

They leave Scientology and the marriage doesn't work because, you know, everything changes. Like, how did you guys so, I don't want to say it was perfectly seamless, but like, how did you guys end up building a great life together? What was the secret to that? I think the shared experience is huge because there's not really going to, I'm not going to find somebody. it would almost be impossible for me to find somebody that knows what I've been through. Which I will say, though, can be a blessing or a curse that we have that shared experience. In our case, you know, we built a family. We have three kids now.

We both have small businesses that we've built up that are very successful. I would say I was lucky in that Mark had skills that translated to the real world. and he believed in me, which was huge. I found something that I love, which is bookkeeping. I mean, QuickBooks, it's nothing fancy like his stuff, but I have a natural love of numbers and math and all that. So I would say that between everything and like I said, therapy, reading books, connecting with other people,

even other cult survivors, not just former Scientologist. But that has really helped. to just help us both in our own way and then together in our relationship work through all that trauma. But yeah, we absolutely have PTSD from a lot of those experiences. The other thing. Still have nightmares. It's getting better, but, you know. I was going to say that's the thing.

When we started connecting with other people who had escaped over the years and started helping and meeting up and everything, that's the biggest thing they don't want you to They don't want you to be able to talk to other people that had the same thing because then you find out, oh, it wasn't me. It wasn't you. It was them. We're the good guys in this thing. They, we all thought we were the bad guy until we got out of there. And then we still wondered, oh, is it me that's broken and I don't qualify to be there?

But then when you start to talk to everybody else, they're like, oh, they told me they were going to do this. And you're just like, same story every time. Same story. What about the meaning of your life, though? You'd always been told this is what it is. It's Scientology. It's like the one thing that ties us all together is we all technically don't know

what happens after it's over and we fight while we're on Earth in many cases about what we think is going to happen and Scientology is a part of that fight because they got their own fucking crazy bullshit theory. But now you're out in the world and you're starting to think about like, I have one life here now.

It's not what they were telling me in Scientology. I'm not really sure what it is, but what's my purpose here on earth? How do you deal with that existential kind of angst? I think that if you are contributing to society or making something for society more than you are taking or consuming, I think that is, that's what you should shoot for. I think you should be making more things than you're consuming. And you're giving to society and to others. I think if you're helping others as well, helping people and providing a service or providing products,

and you raise three other people that can also do that, I think that is a good purpose. I think that's a worthwhile purpose. And Scientology is a vampire. They don't they don't give anything. They only take. They take lives, they take relationships, they money, money. They they there's no, they're not making any good.

They're only making bad and they're leaving a trail of destruction behind them as they go. So if we can do good in our businesses and and survive and have resources for our lives and then help other people and expose a vampire, then I think, I don't know what more I could do than that. And be happy and go on vacation and take the kids, create memories and do this and do all the things that we never got to do as kids ourselves. So that's sort of what I'm shooting for. I mean, we didn't go on a vacation in 15 years. We had never even gone on a honeymoon.

Yeah. Come on, let's call it spade. Our honeymoon was Denny's at 2 a.m. I got the grand slam. Woohoo. Yeah. But so I kind of think like Scientology has no,

they literally have no power over anything that we do. And regardless of all the nonsense we signed, we've done hundreds and hundreds of videos on our channel. And we've, I've take, literally, I put the files up on the screen and I just read. Yeah. Tom Cruise is going to do this. And I just read the documents.

Yeah. And at every opportunity that we have, we'll meet with law enforcement, educate them on the tactics of Scientology, you know, my expert witness testimony, meeting with the FBI. We're like, we'll do anything we can. And that, to me, helps to kind of make everything make sense, helping people get out and start over and, you know, providing community and support. That is so meaningful to us. And it's also you can't really, it's hard to be embarrassed

or affected by all the bullshit that they spew on the internet because they have hate sites about us and they put out magazines with us on the cover. They all look so dumb though. Yeah. They look, they look like a shitty Truman show outtake. Yeah. Like it's a those, those to me, those things say more about them. Yeah. Then they do about me. Totally agree. Yeah. And they really want us to go to those websites. It doesn't, they don't care of whoever finds out anything. We're the intended audience. They want us. So we don't want to satisfy that. It's, I'm just like, what are you going to do? The internet's the internet. You can't change. You can't take stuff off that you don't like. Yeah, it sucks to have lost family to them. I miss my siblings. I'm, I would, I hope one day my mom will

wake up. But the bottom line is, I would be dead if I hadn't escaped. I have not a doubt in my mind. So. Taking your own life. or just there i mean there or there was a time period at the property one year where a person was dying at least every month yeah from cancer you you if you if you have some sort of illness or terminal illness that you could die from you're going to be achy you're going to be tired you're going to be exhausted you're not going to feel well that's a fucking tuesday in the seorck you're never going to know that that's happening when you're always that way so the amount of staff that would find out they had cancer when it was already

stage four and they had weeks to live was it was a lot really common probably at least i would say 50 people either got cancer or died of cancer well in that time period that we were at that property yeah and so that's that's coming bringing me back to the nexium thing with sarah too because there was some suspicion there like oh they definitely maybe they did something to some people who died really quickly and got all the cancer the really if you i mean they've done all kinds of studies i don't know not a doctor anything but high stress environments bad nutrition not enough sleep those are like recipes for your body to just not do well and that you're doing that 15 years by the time i escaped i was quite sure i had cancer but i didn't it was adrenal gland exhaustion adrenogland

exhaustion. Yeah. Now, you, you said your oldest is 20? Yep. So you guys, you guys got started pretty quick on starting a family. Oh, yeah. I think we left in 2005. January, so yeah, January 2005, we escaped. February 2006, our first son was born. Yeah. Didn't wait too long. Yeah, no, those Michael Phelps swimmers got right to work. That's right. Now, did that feel like a bit of a full circle moment and did that give you the opportunity to I hate the word closure because I'm not sure that that's real but did it give you the opportunity to

let yourself mentally move past the prison you had been in with having children forcibly taken from you? Yeah and ironically too like when our first son was born, it really helped me to process and come to terms with what I had lived through as a child for the first time.

Because I just had, you know, in my mind kind of shut the door, locked it, thrown away the key kind of figuratively, which is not healthy either. It's you have to, you have to come to terms with what your lived experience was. And even in the initial, like out like right when we were getting out I was still kind of not protecting my mom or but

just kind of like trying to say oh no it's okay like to her to my other aunts and uncles that were really outraged by her cutting disconnecting from us and I was like no no it's okay and but then when our son was born it came into full focus like the reality of the evil nature of Scientology really 100% like helped me process all of that from you know like I said being born into it and yes all that I haven't had kids yet but my friends have and you know I talk to a lot of people and everyone seems to say the same exact thing which I think makes all the sense in the world which is that your life completely changes and you feel like an unbelievable love you could not have possibly described.

So when you felt that, it's clear to me that you did. And then you compared that to your childhood. Did it confuse you how your mom maybe didn't feel the same thing? If anything, it didn't confuse me. It made me angry. Yeah. You know, because yes, I absolutely felt like having our first son. it was like watching your heart walk around, you know, like, just there's nothing I wouldn't do to protect my kids.

And, you know, it was, I want my kids to never go through anything remotely similar to, like, even down to, I was worried that they would blame themselves for our parents not being in their lives. It's just the way I blamed myself for my dad not being in our lives. And so when we had two sons by this time, I called Dr. Laura Schlesinger, went on the radio show and I said, what do I tell my kids about their grandparents? Because it was really like a heavy load for me. Like I do not want them to ever think it had, it was anything to do with them. And she was like, just always be honest with them and tell them the truth. And they will never go down that path.

And I have. Like, you know, when my, when my oldest son was seven or eight, one day he turned to me and he's like, Mom, when did your mom die? Like, she's not dead. And I just said, you know, she's part of an evil organization that destroys families. And hopefully one day she'll wake up, but she's not dead. Did he That's I can't even imagine that At 70 years old

Did he understand in any way Really the gravity of what you were saying Or was it more just like I think it's just weird for them because all their friends have grandparents Yeah And they have four Or three or two or something And it's like my dad was in their lives before he passed

But that was the only grandparent That they've ever known had one grandpa and no grandmas and no other grandpa. And it was always kind of like, but we have my, on my dad's side, on my mother's side of the family, we are in touch with all my aunts and uncles and cousins. So there's like 30 extended family members that all welcomed us in with open arms. Like, oh, yeah, no, 100%. And in a lot of cases, they helped us over the years to sort of adjust to go.

We would go for every year for Thanksgiving. We would go from Los Angeles, from Burbank. We'd go to Denver where I had a large group of cousins and aunts and uncles that lived in Colorado. And when we would go there for the week of Thanksgiving, we would get to see how a normal family is. and what kind of like what they do. It was so funny because the first time I met all these family members, we had been married for 13 years. And I remember we went to this family reunion and they were like,

oh my gosh, it's so amazing to meet you. You're such a nice person. Please just don't wait 13 years to come see us again. We're like, don't worry about that. That's not a problem anymore. Yeah. My buddy Charlie Rocket has been on the. show before back in episode 352. He's got an amazing life story, but someone that's really

inspired me over a lot of years before I knew him. And one of the great things about him is how he can always flip perspective. Right. So he's got this quote like, two L's make a W because he goes like this. Yeah. And it's like, you hear that and you're like, oh my God, that's actually fire. He's got it. And I can see that obviously the way you're describing this and how hard that is to be able to explain to your kids like why they don't have something that their friends all may have but you know obviously that's not in any way your fault yeah to me the perspective is you guys broke the cycle you guys had the bravery to get away from the evil that that you didn't have a choice to be in you weren't evil it was the evil thing that was holding you in the vampire i love that phrase i'm

to use that forever about Scientology. It's awesome. It's exactly what it is. But you guys got away from the vampire and you gave your kids an opportunity to exist. Like it doesn't get, there's no greater sacrifice or like purpose. Like we were talking about meaning of life. That's kind of what I was getting out asking it. And I like your answer about creation by the way. But like this is the ultimate creation right there. You're creating a family that's now not going to be a part of this like legacy of Scientology. So yes, maybe it would be awesome if your mom could break free of that and not be in that, but you don't have any control over that. You've been able to break free of it and make sure your kids have an opportunity to live a better

life than you did. There's nothing better than that. Yeah. And surrounding our kids, and we've told them this, what matters to us is that they are surrounded by unconditional love and, you know, our family of choice and we do everything in our power to make those core memories for them and give them all the opportunities that we were never afforded. Like our oldest son graduated high school in 2024. And three weeks before that, I got my GED just because I wanted him to know it's important and matters to us. That's cool. You know, and so we graduated together.

So you leave, and you leave by example. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean. And they under, obviously, you know, your kids are older now. So they understand your full experience and what you went through. I'm sure that they're pretty proud.

of you. My oldest, I think one of my proudest moments was my oldest, shortly before he graduated high school. He had to do a book report on somebody who made a difference. A survivor. A survivor. He had to pick a book about a survivor's story. And he chose my book. And when that happened, I was like, he got an A too. So I was like, fucking A, bitch. This book was good for something. But, yeah, no. So he got the story from me, and he's, they've been around. We've met with people. We have people coming and going that we're helping out or staying with us for a little bit or while we get them back on their feet. So, yeah, I think it's, I think that we have done everything possible to make sure that nothing that we had to go through, they will ever have to go through.

That's the ultimate thing right there. It's so cool. I think I like to say that I live by the perspective that your past doesn't define you what you do here and now does. And anything we can do to help people get out and start new lives is just so fulfilling, giving our kids lives that they have everything they need. They have whatever paths they want to follow. We support them.

There is a lot of, you know how lucky you. Yeah, of course. Do you know how much... Anyway, yeah. You know how many iPads we had when we were kids? There's a lot of that for sure. That's okay. We love about it too.

Yeah, exactly, for sure. But they don't... Like back in my now, scrubbing dumpsters with toothbrushes. They got it good and they know we didn't. So let's just set the table here the way we want it here. So we don't do that as a guilt trip on that. Right, right. It's just more like, hey...

Be great for you. for the good things. Do make, make something good out of your life and live a good life and we're here to support that. And that is the other, I think one of the last things I wanted

to make a point of is that we have had it so horrible for so long in Scientology. Throw whatever you got, real world. Yep. There's not,

there hasn't been, I don't think there's been one person that I've dealt with in my life after Scientology. that was as evil or bad intentioned towards me than I did in any day in Scientology. So it's, that's another perspective. Like, no matter how bad it is or how tough this is or what spot you get yourself into, it ain't that.

Yep. And so it's kind of like, we're good. Yeah, you guys have seen the worst of human nature. Yeah. It's all downhill. It's all downhill from here. There's no, there's not going to be any, major challenges that we haven't had to deal with a hundred times the stress and just misery

of that place. So do you guys feel like at this point haven't been over 21 years out, I guess at this point, all of your, like you've totally adjusted to the real world and understanding what it is to be able to be a normal person out in the world or there's still little things that happens sometimes on a day to day basis where you're like, oh shit. But wait, no, I don't need to do that. I think the last thing that we've been sort of grinding on is not working so much. Because we're just wired to do stuff.

Well, yeah. And that's for two reasons. Obviously, the 30 years in Scientology and that crazy schedule and all that. But then starting over with nothing. You got a hustle. And like we had $20 in our pockets and the clothes on our backs were now I was 30. Mark was 32, and we have to hustle to build a life from absolutely nothing with basically no family, no resources, no resume, no education, nothing in the bank, like nothing to fall back on. So, you know, we kind of kicked into overdrive mode. Great work ethic. Yeah.

So one good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Not advertising Scientology. No, no. There are far more effective ways. Yes. There's better ways to get a work ethic. Join the military. Do something. Yeah. For real. But yeah. Sometimes I'll be doing something and she'll be working in her office. It's like seven o'clock at night and I'll be like, we've talked about this. Yes.

The day ends before dinner. He'll be like, where are you? I'm like, oh, I'm coming. Shut it down. Shut it down. You don't owe anybody your life in your off time. Do what you need to do to get your job done. I would say the worst parts of that,

the psychological trauma, you know, every once in a while, something will rear its ugly head and, you know, go back to therapy and be like, okay, you've got to work through this or, you know, reading books and things of that nature. But for the most part, the worst of it we've worked through. But, you know, I don't think there's an end point in recovering from an experience like that. I think it's just a process to, you know, make the best of life that you can and learn from your mistakes as you go and, you know. Warren Buffett, I think it was Warren Buffett said, you don't remember what you skipped in your life to do a work or go to a conference or go to a meeting or do your job.

You don't remember what you, you remember what you skipped, whether it was a graduation or one of your kids' games, but you never remember why you skipped it. It was just whatever. It was that. It was a Tuesday thing. Who cares? But you remember, oh, man, I should have done that. And Scientology, that's your whole life. Yeah.

You never do the things you should be doing. You're only part of this machine just sucking everything out of existence. So, yeah, I think we're doing, we're doing as, we're doing as best as I can. We're making a good shot at it. Yeah, it's an amazing story to me. I mean, you seem like you've absolutely made an unbelievable second act. in life that is actually on your terms, which is so, so cool. But also, like, and I've been struck by this all day, you know, whenever people deal with

traumatic things, whatever it is grown up or whenever they deal with it, there's some sort of coping mechanism that people have. And, like, one thing that's really clear, and you described it earlier, Claire, but yours is humor. Somehow you are funny as fuck. Well, I don't want to. And you were able to develop that in a place that sucks up any ability. to have a personality. That's incredible.

I appreciate that. I appreciate you saying that. And also when I wrote my book, and the book is pretty much my large portion of the 15 years that I was at that property. Most of the book is a little bit growing up, most of it's there, and then getting out of there. But you can't write that and not have to see the craziness and the comedy that's in it because it's depressing. fuck. So there has to be you have to there has to be a little bit of a sugar. 100% it's got to be a little bit. I'm a huge believer in that in life you got to sure and you know you got to time it sometimes yeah yeah sometimes you're over maybe I shouldn't have done that joke when she was saying that thing that might have happened once or twice

today but like comments I made during this I'm going to hear about you but you do have to you have to make levity of it. Yeah it is what it is. And also, for any stories that I was telling, that was me then, not me now. That's right. Okay? Whatever I said, whatever language I used, that was the old Mark. Yeah. And Mark has taught me with his humor and it is one of the top, my top favorite qualities.

He's a really good storyteller that helps too, which I didn't find out until eight years into our marriage, by the way. I was shocked. I was like, he told the story. I was laughing so hard. For eight years, you never heard a story? Not well. Wasn't a lot of storytell in time. No.

No. I remember the moment I was like, holy shit, he is a really good storyteller. I couldn't breathe. I was laughing so hard. And, you know, like I said, in the life that we live, that humor is oxygen to your soul. It's just like, because what else can you do? Cry? I mean, what else is there to do other than move forward, live the best life you have?

have and if there's a way to look back and laugh and learn something from it in that moment, there's power in that. Do you guys feel happy in life today? Yes. Yeah. We're slaying it right now. Yeah. Yeah.

We do. Good for you. We try not to, you know, brag about, you know, what's happening and everything, but we're doing, we're doing just fine. There's no, we're not, there's no worry. There's really little, very little worry besides how am I going to get all the work done that got. We're incredibly grateful for where we're at today. I even got to fly a plane, by the way. Yeah. But you were the pilot? Yeah. The plane. Yep. Are you licensed? No. No. No. It was with an

instructor. But nonetheless. I don't know if I love that, but no. She took off. I was with an instructor. For the first time flying a plane, this wasn't like a United flight, right? No. That's Southwest. It was a serious. No. No, but I'm just. I'm saying like, you know, the opportunities we've had and the work Mark does is incredible. And, you know, we've managed to build a life from nothing, like I said. That's awesome. Yeah. Do you forgive the family members who brought you into the world?

I'm ready to forgive them if they ask for forgiveness. But when they're still continuing to support a criminal organization, like by virtue of their hate videos on Scientology's website, They're not asking for forgiveness. I would absolutely be willing to forgive. But I don't know. I've thought about that many times. And if someone's continuing to commit crimes, do you forgive them?

I mean, how does that work? It's a complicated thing to me is that my- I don't have hate, I don't hold a shred of hate for them. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. My family members that are still in Scientology is my mother and my sister. and my sister worked at the same place I worked.

So she knows what goes down there. So for her to say, oh, he was bad and he did this. And David Miscavage never touched, never even heard a butterfly in his life. You know, it's just like, I'm like, you were there. What are you doing? So for me, that's kind of like, not only you do selling their bullshit about me and talking shit on the website or the hate videos or whatever it is. But then I'm like, but you know what I'm saying is that what happened. So it's kind of like, first hand. Come on, man. And you're not even there. She had, they had a kid.

Her and her husband had a kid and they got out. And I'm like, that's because of me. You got out because of me. The reason you live in the real world and you don't have to play by all their rules is because of what Claire and I did. And you're still talking shit. So to me, it's kind of like, I don't know. her and I kind of differ on that part of it, but I'm kind of like you know, if you're not adding to my life, then come on.

If you're not, if you're just spout and evil that Scientology, it's hard for me to go like, I don't know. At the same time, I do think they're victims as well. Right. But then I'm kind of like, you know, you can't ride the victim train forever when you're now on the hate video. You're on,

on the hate website. It's like, come on. Now you're playing. But at the end of the day, I know, well, they're not, my mom's not going to be able to see my sister. If she doesn't do it, my sister's not going to be able to see my mom if she doesn't do it. So I'm kind of like. And also the fact that their Scientology is weaponizing our family against them, again, says more about Scientology than it ever does about us. Yeah. Absolutely. It's an impossible spot for me to imagine like you guys being in having to, that's like kind of like, last frontier because it is your blood. You know, it's your family in there rather than just the full organization.

So I can't speak to that at all. But you guys seem to have amazing perspective on your own. I think that's what matters the most. So what do we do? Like seven hours today? Is that a big one? Is that a long one? That's a good one.

Okay. If I'm talking to you for seven hours, I like you. Okay. That's pretty much what it is. We appreciate you having us on and hearing our story. And you want to, my book, it's at Blumfordgood.com. link below, LinkedIn description. And you have one coming in September.

Yep. And so it's on Blown for Good. And also Claireheadley.com is where I'm posting updates and news about that as I get to the finish line. Excellent. Well, congratulations on the book. Congratulations on all your success since leaving and building a family and everything. And thank you so much for going through all of it today. Awesome.

We appreciate it. Thank you for having us. Of course. Of course. So everyone else, if you're watching the second episode right now, there was a first one before this that'll be linked down below other than that give it a thought get back to me peace hey guys if you're not following me on spotify please hit that follow button and leave a five star review they're both a huge huge help thank you