Last Podcast On The Left - Some Place Under Neith / Episode 1: Shelly Miscavige Part I - The Commodore's Messengers

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Some Place Under Neith is a deep dive exploration into cases of missing women. Producer and stunt woman Natalie Jean and comedian Amber Nelson laugh maniacally as they burrow into these fascinating stories and find out how we all can help.Brought to you by The Last Podcast Network.Art by @chaos_magic

Some place underneath. Hey Amber. Hello Natalie. Does anybody ever call you Ambular? No, but they call me Smelson. Smelson? But you smell lovely. Is it because you smell good? Because my name is Amber Sophia Nelson,

and Amber Sophia Nelson sounds like a little pageant girl that went missing. You are not. You are from the south, so I could see you being a pageant girl, but you did not go missing fortunately for us. You weren't a pageant girl, were you? I did one pageant, and I was very bad at it.

I did it to please my mother, because she's the queen of beauty pageants, and a lot of women in my family are just incredibly beautiful and poised, and I was not. I was very spooky, and I had sticks in my hair, so I did it. But you're still beautiful and poised.

Thank you. It took many years of training and trying. I wish you still had sticks in your hair. I say put them back in. Thank you for coming along on this journey. Welcome to some place underneath Episode 1. You're really helping me out here.

I'm a little fascinated by dark stories and mysteries, particularly when a woman is involved, and I've been reading so much about it that I needed to talk about it, because I feel like justice is not being served very often.

No, it's not. I try to help and also just talk about these stories because I don't feel like they're being told, which is what the meaning of the title is. People go missing all the time, and it's a shame when they're just like, oh, they went missing, but if you went missing,

wouldn't you want someone talking about you, looking for you? I would. And it's hard, especially when it's adults, because there's all these sort of things that come into play with that where maybe they don't want to be found, or maybe it's their prerogative to go missing.

They want to hide. Right. In that case, hopefully I'm not talking about somebody who's trying to hide from somebody. We've found you. No, I was hiding from the government. No. No, I won't say, mostly we'll be talking about that. The reason I'm starting with this episode, it's one of the most

onerous, maddening, prolific cases, and that's of Shelly Miskovich. It's great, a lot of people know about it, and they're like, oh, wow, she went missing, but yeah, it's one of those cases that really, I think, embodies what I want to do with this show,

which is to talk about a story where we've all just nodded in agreement that this woman is just kind of missing, and then we move on with our day, which there's a lot of challenges to this, and I know, and also talking about her is also going to address other things that are problematic

in Scientology beyond the obvious things, that being that there are technically other missing people in Scientology. Her name is the most famous because she is at the top of the pyramid, but there are people who haven't been seen

by anyone but Scientologists in decades. Yeah, they're family, they have to cut off their family, and that's when you know you're in a cult, when they're like, be with us, don't, anybody who says you can't be with us, just cut them out of your life. Yeah, there's a lot of warning signs, but it's really interesting that I've never been in a cult, but I was,

you know, in destructive relationship, shall we say, and it's sometimes so hard to see it until you're right outside of it, and you're like, what the fuck was that? Oh, yeah, yeah, oh, he was punching the wall? Yeah. He was punching the wall, and I was blaming myself for that? And I was like, well, if I just don't do that,

he won't punch the wall anymore. It's my fault, it's my fault. Yeah, so sometimes it's really hard when you're in there, and I get it. So it's really, it's not a, you know, pointing finger situation, except at David Miscovich, I will point all of my fingers at him, especially my middle one. And my toes.

I'll point my toes at him. I'll point my toes right at him. But, you know, this is a fascinating cult. I'm just going to call it a cult because it is, and it's a high-control subculture, basically. So it's very uncomfortably easy to erase a person from existence within

side of one of those units. And they own a lot of things, Scientology. Do you know they own the Arclight Theater? Yes. That's my favorite theater. Yeah, they own a lot. They don't have that many people anymore, but they have a ton of money. They're real estate, which is the money baby. Yeah, that's where you got to take

it from Scientology. You got to invest in some real estate if you get some cash, you know. Oh, man. They just have huge, like buildings of people. And I was talking to my friend and she says that her like a friend of a friend went into the Scientology. She hasn't seen them in forever because during COVID, they all got locked

down and like, they can't leave. They're in masks all the time. And I'm a very social person and like talking to people, you know, and then this van pulls up and all these people come out and they're getting all these to-go orders for their friends. And I'm like, hey, was that sandwich place good? What's going on? Is that sandwich good?

And they refuse to speak to me and she's like, they're the Scientology people. I actually, because we have a newer Scientology building near where we live in Los Angeles. And for the first time in three years, I saw people going into it the other day, which made me sad

because usually it's completely empty. They have tons of empty buildings around the country. So weird. No one goes in or out. No. It's their shells to keep their tax-free status, which is a big problem. I also myself went

and visited Goldbase from the outside because I was really curious about it. And I'll talk about that later on in the series that we're doing. That is really one of the things that I'm going to talk about a lot on the show, which is within the freedoms of our country we have also

given people free reign to basically abuse the idea of spirituality and religion. And Scientology is right at the top of that where they in order to get tax-exempt status, they became a church. They called themselves a church and started adding crosses into their imagery

and calling things church words in order to get this state. Well, my friend, my friend, he was an Uber driver. A close friend, Juan. But he's from Mexico and he said people who come from Mexico

usually don't speak that great of English and are usually very Catholic. So they see these crosses and they go in there thinking it's Catholic and they go in and get God. Yep, exactly. I mean, that was kind of part of part of the scam. I mean, good job because we're watching

the next team documentary right now and that only lasted for a few years. Scientology has really dragged this out. But part of having a large sect, a lot of times is females are very hard to account for. And I mean like cis-born females, I'm going to try to never misgender during this

podcast. But if I do, I apologize and I'm going to work on it. But they're really just the females within these kind of communities are often expected to live work and kind of exist solely within their tiny microcosms. So sometimes it's really hard to even clock

their existence. Yeah. Do they even have a social security number? Right. Which is terrifying. Yeah. Because then there's no rules. Just right. Is that the Outback Steakhouse? I think so. So it's just like Outback Steakhouse. In those scenarios

I want to talk about what consent looks like. Because say in the case of Shelly, she hasn't been seen publicly since 2007. She hasn't been seen on documented video since 2004. And whenever a missing persons report was filed by

Leah Remini in 2013, which was documented on her show detectives allegedly made contact with her. What? Yeah. And they claim that upon being interviewed, she said she was fine and she asked to be left alone. Within that, there are several problems.

One being if a grown adult says she's happy and doesn't want to be bothered, should we just leave her alone? It sounds like we should, right? But it's more complicated than that for when I'm not really convinced that the detectives actually saw her. And that's just a complete opinion

that's speculation. But a lot of times the LAPD and the system within Los Angeles has been pretty corrupt because of money. And there's a lot of different points where it looks like Scientology has sort of paid off authority figures

for things. So that's just a complete speculation. I don't know. I don't know anything about that. But also, the other side of that, this is basically what this series is going to be about, is that we know her name and we know that she's missing. But I didn't know really anything else

about her. No. But also, according to their culture, are we brainwashed? Whoa! But I say you're brainwashed if you can't, like, go to the grocery store and get a sandwich. Well, yeah, that's when Consent comes into play with this because they can crow all day about

us being brainwashed into the society or whatever. But we still have the choice. If we want to go hiding, we can. If we want to move somewhere, we can. And then we can still talk to everyone we've ever known. Yeah. But if a culture tells us, no, you can't do that. You can't

go to the grocery. You can't go look at that. You can't wear that. Then that's that's a problem. Right. And so when she's saying she's consenting to her imprisonment but has never had choices in her life to, like, have an orgasm or

like been day drunk at a less than Jake show, you know? If you've never had those opportunities, do you even understand what consent is? Yeah. I mean, you want to go back to the prison. Like there was this kid from North Korea who escaped the camps

and I saw an interview where he was like, I want to go back because I don't understand this world. Totally. He didn't understand money, furniture. He's like, what is this? What do you mean you trade these bills for these things? Yeah, you go back. Exactly. And as we'll get into, she didn't ever have experiences outside of Scientology

essentially. So it's why I felt the need to look into her life and have a bigger discussion about what consent looks like in this situation. I've heard a lot of men say, like, women, once they go to college and once they do these things, then they don't want to come back to

traditional values. I'm like, well, then maybe, maybe then that's not a good thing. I mean, I like traditional values. My family's very conservative, but if you go off to college or go off to the big city and you don't want to come back, I mean, maybe that says something about your life. Yeah. And also

if you go off into the big city and you decide you don't like it and you want to go back, that's great. That's great. Good for you, whatever. Go raise a family. There's nothing wrong with that. It's certainly, in essence, it's wonderful. But that's how America survives. That's not

everybody should be an artist in New York. You know, go back to your hometown. There's too many of us, frankly. I'm nauseated by us most of the time. But, yeah, you have to be able to discern what that means on your own and to make that decision

on your own and not with threat of going to hell or whatever other, you know, consequences there would be from other people in your life. Should there be a checklist? You know, like, have you had an orgasm? Do you have a pair of heels? Have you ever

cut school and you know, gotten on the train and shop lifted an incense stick? Yeah, you ever taken your car and drove two states over and lied to your family and said you just went to Walmart? Yeah, you need to make a couple mistakes in there and see for yourself

what that means and, you know, I feel like it's important to mention that I'm certainly not suggesting the way I live is the way other people should live. I can't recommend very much of my life to anybody. No, same here. Yeah, and if you want to have a family

and be whatever you want, it's your life. Exactly. That's your consent, you know. Right. So, Shelly herself seems to have disappeared into this lexicon of various unaccounted forecrimes of the Church of Scientology and we know

about a lot of them, but she is a human being who is, if still alive, kept locked away in a dark corner whether or not she considers herself a captive. There's a lot of speculation she's being held in a particular compound in California owned by the Church

and I myself needed to experience that with like all of my senses because I've heard of it, and I've seen photos and everything, but I wanted to see it. So, I went there and I'll talk about that experience. You went there? I did. Wow. Yeah. Do you get on the train?

You got in a car? I got in a car. So, they probably got your license plate. Oh, I got a rental. Oh, there you go. I was super paranoid about it and Henry was laughing at me and I was like, I don't want them to trace us to our house even though I don't think they have the power to do that, but... I don't think

Scientology has guns themselves. They'll hire somebody with guns, but... And back when they were still more secretive and there weren't a million people trying to call them out, it was easier to trace everybody, but now that it's out there so much, I'm just one of many voices, so I'll get to that. We'll talk about that

a little later, but I want to start at the beginning because I need to reverse engineer her life to understand how this happens. So, the very obvious first thing is if... Who's Shelley Miscovich? Well, we know her as the wife of the current chairman of the Board of Scientology,

David Miscovich. If you do not know what Scientology is, I do not recommend listening to this first. You probably should go read up on it. There's literally an endless barrage of information about Scientology. I think they think

the Earth of Xenard... Xenu. Xenu, Xenu, and then we all, you know... I like Xenard better, though. Xenard's the unattractive brother of Xenard. I'm Xenard. Aw, man, he never gets anything. So,

yeah, there's so many resources to look this up, but, you know, it was created, the very, very, very brief synopsis that was created by a man named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, who goes by L. Ron Hubbard or LRH. He was a science fiction author, and

he also science fiction authored most of his life and made up who he was. He was a con artist, all around flim flamman, and he founded the Church of Scientology in 52. So, it's been going for almost three quarters of a century.

He knows what he's doing. Good business. He really did, and I think one of the keys to keeping a cult going past the original leaders, you needed a second psycho to come and step in to continue it on, which is what happened with David.

You just got to find somebody beating a horse with a hammer, and you're like, aha, that's my predecessor. You know, it's not that far off, except David really took the reins of that horse, and L. Ron didn't really hand it to him as much as David took it as he was dying. So, basically, Shelly

and David, her husband, were both legacy kids. Really, Shelly's life is so guarded because of her childhood she had. I had to basically read, like, 10 different Scientology books and just, like, kind of go through and, like, pluck out of these tiny little

facts from people who kind of knew who she was as a kid. Because her parents were in Scientology, too, right? Yeah. So, they taught that they, ooh, it's like a long line of being poisoned. Absolutely. Well, kind of credit these books as I go through, and I also want to credit Tony Ortega,

who is one of the leading researchers on Scientology. He has been working on revealing this before most people knew what Scientology was, so he has a lot of content out there. But let's just get into this. So, Michelle Diane Shelly Barnett was born on

January 18th, 1961 in Dallas, Texas, and raised any family of Scientologists. Shelly's father, Maurice Elliott Barnett, who went by Barney, was born April 30th, 1930. He was apparently a handyman and sort of a

off-and-on guy who struggled to find work a lot. There's not a ton known about him, and he died in 2007, which is the last time Shelly was seen by anybody. Interesting. So, you think her parents would be a little more up in the system if she married the big hauncho guy?

Well, her mother, whose name is Mary Florence Barnett Miller, who was known as Flo Barnett at the time. She was born in Missouri on June 7th, 1933, and it looks a lot like it points to she was sort of

the person who brought everybody else in her family into Scientology. So, she found it, and then kind of just drug Barney along. As women do. I know. It's always the woman in the relationship that pulls people in religion. So many people, like the mother passes

and the dad's like, I'm not going to church anymore. Every time. Well, I guess this is going to be a lot of men in hell, isn't there? Oh, sorry. I shouldn't have laughed so hard. So, she, I think we can kind of discern that she was

the forebearer. She was the leader of this, bringing the family into Scientology. Flo, a very 1930s name, by the way. It really is. And again, there's not a ton of information about who she originally heard about Scientology from. But somehow she got in there.

Scientology wasn't until the 50s, right? Yes. And she's born in the 30s. She was in her 20s. She was an adult. She was an adult. There was no, yeah, basically when I say legacy kid, the first rush of Scientologists came in the early

60s, the late, late 50s when he was sort of shifting over from writing Dianetics into actually creating this cult. So, she had four daughters with Barney, and they were Clarice, Michelle, Camille, and

Metary. Yeah. I don't know that name, but I kind of like it. Lafayette and Metary are both Louisiana names. Those are the towns in Louisiana. I wonder if there's some sort of connection to Louisiana or Cajun culture? I mean, definitely southern culture. Acadians. I know Acadians came

from Canada, and then scooted all the way down to Louisiana, and so there's a big Acadian culture down there. Maybe something with Canada. I don't even know what Acadians are. Yeah, it's like this whole group of people. They came from Canada, and they just boot, scoot, and boogie all the way down to Louisiana, and they live a lot.

A lot of them are in Lafayette, and they created Zydeco music. Oh, got it, got it. They're missing women in there? They hide women? Probably in the swamps. That's the best way to hide a body. Oh, my God, the swamps are filled with missing women. We'll try to find them, though. Mettory, regardless.

She died as a baby. So she, yeah, she just passed away very young. They were all born in Texas. So all of those kids, even though Flo was born in Missouri, they were a Texas family. And like I said, it was really hard to gauge

exactly how her family fell under the LRH spell. But they went in whole hog. They were in it to win it. So a lot of this information about the younger years I got from a woman named Janice Gillam Grady's books series called

Commodore's Messenger. She grew up around Shelly and her older sister Clarice in the late 60s, and she was also a Scientology kid. So this is where I'm getting some of this sourced. This is the first

known mention I can find of this family at all. She mentions in her first book, Meeting the Barnets in UK in 1967, she says, with mom now gone from the house, dead red and at our guest room to help pay the bills, Flo Barnet, an American woman,

came to stay with us while doing her auditing training at St. Hill. St. Hill is, by the way, in West Sussex in the UK. That was one of the locations where Elron was kind of housing people and training them for a time. So her oldest daughter Clarice,

aged 10, came with her. They're two younger daughters, Michelle, known as Shelly, and Camilla, back behind in Texas. Clarice did not attend school, so instead she stayed at home alone reading while waiting for Terry and me to arrive home from school. So... So she didn't go to school?

I guess back in the day, it was kind of like you were hot shit if you graduated high school. Presidents used to be like, this is Tommy. He graduated high school. And I think especially for females, but there wasn't a lot of schooling going on here. So essentially, Flo came, a lot of...

Scientology, you can see from this, it drew people from all over the place. So we have Americans, we have people in the UK, Janice Grady's family is Australian, and so these people are kind of flocking to him already in the UK to this big compound, this big, huge, pretty house

compound that he got called St. Hill that he acquired. So Flo brought Clarice to this place with her, and that's Shelly's older sister. And Janice who wrote these books is closer to Clarice in age.

This is really how I'm getting a lot of this information. You might be asking, did not one of these people get out and can tell us anything about what happened? And yes and no, like I said before, Barney died in 2007, and he'd also they'd been divorced for a while and he had removed himself from all

of it and kind of lived his own life, and he quietly... He quietly died. He's probably like, this is crazy. Yeah, he was eventually just like, oh no, no thank you. And Flo, we'll talk about this later, she died in a very suspicious suicide in 1985. Really? Yeah.

Oh, like a shotgun, but... Yeah, a long gun, three shots to the chest and one to the head and they called it a suicide. No! Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. Sometimes like, it's just easier to file something as missing than to research. So I have for like

read reports where it's like, oh the woman was hog-tied and shot in the back of the head. Suicide. Natural causes. Yeah. Yeah, totally. We'll talk about that when we get to that that era, but yes, it's questionable at best. So, and then with the other

members of the family, Clarice, still at the core of Goldbase, which is one of their main locations they have now, which I also visited and I will talk about later. She is still inside. Her ex-husband and former Sea Org member, John Brousseau, has spoken out on Leigh Show and other places about his personal

relationship with Clarice, but not really much about Shelly. But her ex-husband is out and is an outspoken anti-scientologist. Okay. Clarice is also mentioned in Mark Headley's book Blown for Good, another ex-scientologist as sort of a resigned

slave at Goldbase. He said that Clarice, her older sister, is just sort of like going through the motions. But technically, she's also missing because nobody's seen her in decades. I just like, eyes have nothing behind them, just picking up boxes and putting them on the other side of the room.

For sure. And then Camille, the other sister, sometimes she's referred to as Camilla, I'm not sure which one it is. She's completely removed herself from anything to do with Scientology and also her family. So she's alive, but she has I imagine in fear of the church just like, I want nothing

to do with this. I won't talk. Nobody want, find me. Leave me alone. Just living in the woods. Definitely not somebody who should be like, let's go find her. Exactly. That is a missing person I feel like who has made her statement on, please leave me alone and don't fucking come near me.

Yeah, she's in the woods, fishing. I hope she's having a great time, you know. She wasn't as involved anyway, but I did find documents saying that she had been declared clear in 82, which clear if you're not familiar, there's, oh my god, the fucking. The terms.

The terms, the acronyms, the initialisms. It's mind melting and it's really I feel like how they keep people in because I cannot keep them straight in my head. My brain refuses to remember them because it's so asinine and redundant. Yeah, well

I was like at somebody's house and they were like staying with somebody and the people they were staying with were Scientologists and they had a child. So I picked up this child Scientology book and another thing about a cult is it gets you, you can't speak plainly on your own words. You have to speak

with their dialect and take one word and replace it with this word and you might not think it's a big deal but it kind of is when it all adds up because words train your brain. Yeah. I was looking at it and the girl was like, you have to put that away and I was like, why?

And she's like, because if they see you they're going to get mad and I was like, it's a child's book. If I can't look at it, then that's their problem. I want to see a child Scientology book. That sounds fascinating. It was fascinating and they're like, you can't look at that. And I was like, wait a minute, I can't look at this. I'm going to see

what these kids are learning and they got super weird and I was like, I hate you. Good. And also if you're afraid to show people what you're teaching your kid, that's, that is a warning sign also. Yes. Wow, that's fun. I wish I could see that book. I mean, I don't, I don't think you can order that on Amazon.

You know, probably is one on eBay. Probably. We have the whole Dianetics. We have a bunch of the level content because all of that stuff has come out. But one of the, I think one of the things that really helps people stay in a cult is that dialogue, they have that vocabulary, their

own language makes you feel special and different and above other people. You've gone clear. Right. So you are now essentially higher up being in a lot of ways. So with flow, I mentioned that she had brought her child to the UK location.

Like so many parents who found their way into Scientology, she became increasingly distant from her children according to Janice Grady. And Elron himself believed very grossly that children and adults were all old Thaetans. Thaetan is

like your spirit essentially. Yeah, you would have children around him all the time, right? Yeah. Surprisingly, he was not a touchy. He wasn't a molesty by all accounts. A lot of people think it's because his penis didn't work. Oh, is he like a Michael Jackson type? Kind of someone who

love kids, but there's no real actually, I think he hated kids, which is why he wanted them to act like adults, which is what he did. So he encouraged and sometimes demanded family separate to achieve different goals for the org that even if someone was your child in this life, they may have been your

parent in a previous life. Therefore, you didn't need to worry about raising them because they were already old. Well, the family unit is one of the strongest units and that's why a lot of cults, they separate the families because if you're a mother, then my husband

and my children are above you. I'm going to take care of my newborn before I take care of this leader. Right. And they can't have that. No. They're first. Nope, exactly. And they say after her pilgrimage to the UK, Flo had had her two daughters in LA with her at

the Celebrity Center, which still exists. People never saw her engage with her children whatsoever. And that's sort of encouraged. You hear that over and over again in these books. People who had parents and family inside of Scientology, they didn't see them very often. So you're already seeing the setup for the transition of

Shelley being fully detached from her parents. And also you can snitch on your family too. Like if they do something wrong. Oh, yeah. Some wrong thing. The whole process of Scientology is pointing out other people's mistakes. Yeah, because then you get elevated higher if you point out somebody else's mistakes.

And also anything you do somehow is somebody else's fault at the same time. It's very confusing. So the Sea Org is where we're going to go next because this is really what developed Shelley as a human being. Yeah. Why do they like boat so much?

Explain to me that. He's a dork. Mm-hmm. He lied. He had he has stolen valor too. He claimed to have all of these medals and stuff. And he was, I believe, enlisted for a while that he created this whole Elrond that is he created this whole persona that he had

like been on these battleships and he shot all these people and won all these medals and stuff. Even though it's easily traceable that he didn't. He didn't. But also boats, you can go on the water in maritime law. Yeah. You can get away with anything. Well, that is part of the reason he ended up doing that as well.

This was in 67 when he created Sea Org. So he was telling people it was because he was going to hand off Scientology to other people. And he was going to go ship back into adventures. He wanted to go sail the seas and discover new things like he used to in his

past life, which is all lies. But so he wanted to start going back into that life. Partly also you find out later, shockingly it's because he was in a bunch of financial trouble with the government and he was trying to hide. Mm-hmm. But he didn't say that at the time, of course. On these boats

he created a fleet and it started out with one boat and then he had two and then he had three. And when he was creating that one of the easiest ways to get a lot of the work done on these old broken boats that he found was to get child slaves to come and help him. So ultimately

the Sea Org brought on children and teens to essentially be raised, groomed and made to work by him on a boat full time. Awful. A lot of them did not come with their families either. They did not attend school at all. He during this time changed

from being called his name to insisting on only being addressed as Commodore. So these ship kids were known as Commodore's messengers. Oh my god. They had some adults on the ship too who were doing they were not sailors. He basically brought in just people from land and was like

you're gonna be the person who steers. You're gonna be the person who fixes the poles. I'm surprised it didn't sink. I mean sailing across the oceans about the hard work. They almost did a couple times but basically part of Scientology is like you can't figure this out. You're an idiot and you're

bad and you're so it's almost not motivating in a sense that if you're psychologically drilled into believing you have to learn how to do something, sometimes you just do. You will learn it. Interesting. So these kids they're just like 10 years old being like oh captain my captain. They started out

so Janice Grady the woman who wrote the book she was one of the very first kids who ended up on this boat and she was I believe 12 at the 13 maybe at the time when she got on there ended up being younger kids a lot of them were between 13 and 17 years old eventually and most of them were women. Yeah

women girls. Girls. Didn't you say there was like a little kid that like crawled out of a hole? Oh yeah I'll tell you that story and so in LRH's words himself this is what he says. He wrote in an actual I don't think it was a book I think it was probably some one of the many many

manuals he's put out in Scientology and Your Children. He wrote they are and let's not overlook the point men and women a child is not a special species of animal distinct from men a child is a man or woman who has not attained full

growth. Wow that's brilliant Alon thank you so much for that information any law which applies to the behavior of men and women applies to children and then later on in different flag order that's like Sharia law shit too. Oh yeah so and in later on he also

says and I want some other document a feyton is simply a feyton body size has nothing to do with it. The trouble with children is that it is a generality that that's the way children are. A suppressive is a suppressive whether he is big or small we don't have suppressives in this

York whether they are big or small big or small upstats get upstat treatment and SP's get declared do you know what half of those words men Amber? No that's part of the fun. Yes their own language and they all just think they're so special learning to speak this language and they all just declare SP's declared

yeah so here's a couple stories about what happens to the kids on these boats I want to set this up because I want people to understand the environment that Shelly was walking into and because we have limited information about her herself this is the environment she was

raised in. Groomed in let's say back on the Royal Scotsman which is one of their boats a cute little six year old girl named Angela was one of the May arrivals. Angela had done something that caught the Commodore's attention Ron looked at children as adults and little bodies regardless of age

and thus capable of acting like adults the Commodore labeled Angela a suppressive person and ordered her to be sent to the chain locker the chain locker is the part of it's like where the chain is housed for the anchor so it's like when you release the anchor

the chain unravels inside of this little room and so dangerous well this is all from Janice Grady's book and this she continues I did not know that she was there until one meal time when I went to the poop deck where we were mustard and saw a skinny little girl climb out of the hole

that the anchor chain comes out of she was filthy and hungry crying for her mother I took her with me to find her mother in the blowdecks and at that point I made a firm decision that I planned to never do anything resulting in myself being thrown in the chain locker so Janice herself is a kid at this point

and she sees this and a kid's reaction is well I have to do whatever I can to never be in there instead of going oh this is super fucked up yeah because you're also so tiny like how can you be like get the boat home right now I have a gun you know

right totally and as a kid too if you're being literally bred on pirate waters you don't know what human rights are yeah you don't know oh my gosh here's this other one too I want to read real quick here this other experience she watched this child named Derek

so Derek was a three year old adopted son of someone on the boat named Felice he was the cute boy probably the only black person on the ship at the time Felice like my mother was a very dedicated Scientologist to a fault instead of being a mother who stood up for her child

little Derek was ordered to the chain locker for having chewed up some telex tape telex tape is how they used to communicate it was like pretext message telex tape was about three quarters of an inch wide and long with little coated holes in it when put into

a telex machine it translate the message in readable form Derek was even smaller than Angela and he could have easily gone down the chain onto the anchor hanging from the after the ship over the harbor or he could have climbed up and out like Angela did instead Derek remained in the chain locker crying in the dark for hours

for his mother who did not come when anyone was assigned to the chain locker they were assigned a condition of enemy for which the formula is find out who you really are every day the master arms went to the chain locker and called down to Derek who are you Derek replied

my name is Derek Queen because she did it with the list after a few because he's three after a few tries the master arms let him out but would have preferred Derek to say he was a thing an immortal spirit not a body not a mind and not

a name Felice later left the ship with Derek as she was transferred to Los Angeles where her Derek continued to be neglected getting into more trouble as he grew older as mother continued to dedicate her time to Scientology by auditing others oh my god what a horrible mother this is

I mean she needs to go to jail there's so many people who should have gone to jail during this time period what does he do and is he okay I don't know we should see where Derek is I feel bad for this little boy three and you put stuff in your mouth because that's how you learn about the world

and then they threw him in a dark hole yeah and they were trying to at three already tell them that he was not who he was completely just trying to erase this kids will and ability yeah so this is how it was on the

ship it's not a wild jump to conclusion that this was part of the way he controlled the minds of the young and how it would have been relatively easy to mold Shelley's brain into whatever he needed especially if her particular genetic makeup was keen to lean into the doctrine which some people were way more into it

and some people rebelled against it because that's just human nature you know and Grady herself in this book acknowledges that while technically they were being shown the world because they did they sailed all over the world she saw like 10 countries before she was 16 and she was being trained how to like run a

ship she was also not given a choice and in many ways they were they had like a toddler's understanding of how the world worked because LRH was always telling them about how the police system and the government was corrupt which they are yeah but

instead of telling them to then make their own decisions about things and use critical thinking he said you can only trust me I'm the only person who can help you and so they were isolated entirely on water and at the whim of LRH and he could teach them whatever he wanted so she

memorized dynetics she could spout off anything from there but she also in her early teens could barely string a paragraph together in writing and that's another way to keep people in control because when you write especially your own words then you have a connection with your inner self for sure no yeah he didn't

like want any of that happening ever she writes in her book well with very few of us educated in civics cultural or government affairs political operations we had no clue about how the world or governments operated in different countries we had come from or that we visited we did not know anything about human rights or civil rights I did

not even know that as I had any rights as a child or a citizen so if children are born into Scientology and do not receive proper education it stands to reason that we would not be aware of any violations of human rights such as child labor laws and the like yeah and so of course she's Shelly

Miskovich you might have seen her you might have not but she says I'm okay right now exactly this is how that happens so Shelly's going to enter the scene here now the sea org started in 67 Shelly's older sister Clarice comes in around

70 maybe 69 so the woman who wrote this book Janice Grady she was closer Clarice's age but they also there at this point there was about between 5 and 10 young girls on this ship many of whom without their parents Shelly

herself would come to this ship this main ship the Apollo around 1972 she would have been between 11 or 12 at the time so she was joined by Shelly Clarice was joined by Shelly she had two sisters on the ship the rest of their family was not there

so now that this has been established the Commodore's messengers these young girls they wielded a huge amount of power on the ship they were essentially considered the mouth piece for LRH so they would basically run the ship for him where he

would be in his quarters and they would go back and forth they yelled at adults because they were considered adults by him little girl sea captains yeah they really were which and that sounds like kind of the funnest part of this job but this is also what they had to do I mean sometimes

little girls are mean like if they yelled at a 12 year old who's never been disciplined and taught empathy yelling at me I'd be like oh I guess I gotta move the thing then you know I feel like I would have enjoyed that part of this experience but there's also other things they had to do

not sex fortunately good didn't they have like little weird outfits oh they did yeah a little bit later on and in this story they just because they weren't wearing real uniforms at the time and then eventually he let them choose

their own outfits which surprisingly are like crop tops and knee-high socks and like daisy tubes the game wardrobe I'll show you pictures I'll post the pictures on Instagram also they became like the leaders of the ship essentially and

he was also in ill health at the time he was on a lot of drugs even though he promoted never using substances and he they always do at the end towards the end of their life call leaders usually end up addicted to drugs continue the megalomania and like their own internal persistence

brain saying you're not actually what you say you are and you have to lie to yourself over and over again as you get older it gets harder you have to start taking drugs to do it so that messengers had assumed many little extra tasks on his behalf they would

wash and comb his hair when he went to the bathroom this is uh Jana speaking we would lay out his clothes powder his socks and shoes and fold everything ready to get him dressed everything had to be right because if it wasn't he would yell at us and we didn't want to upset him the last thing we wanted to do

was upset him when he came out of the shower he would be in his underwear two of us held his pants off the floor as he stepped into them he didn't like his trouser legs to touch the floor god forbid that should happen we pulled up his pants and buckled his belt although he zipped them so don't worry about that

we put on his shirt buttoned it up we put his cools in his shirt pocket tied his cravat and combed his hair at the time he'd be standing there watching us run around him then we'd follow him out on the deck carrying anything you might need cloak hat binoculars ashtray spare cigarettes

anything you could possibly think of wanting we felt it was an honor and a privilege to do anything for him the messengers were all potential high school cheerleaders in appearance pretty blondes with even white teeth and red lips pert little breasts straining against not at halter tops oh this is actually a quote from the barefaced messiah

a different book bare midriffs tight hot pants long tan legs bobby socks and platform sold sandals they had devised the uniform themselves with the Commodore's approval and it gave them maximum opportunity to flaunt their pubescent assets to advantage

I remember being like 13 and being like yeah I want to wear a craptap you know yeah and my parents having to be like no no you wear a shirt that covers you and they'd be like mom I can do what I want sure especially on the job I also think that there's a big difference if you are

deciding to do those things or if an adult is encouraging you to dress like a slut it's I'm sorry I shouldn't say a slut I didn't mean that I don't know why I just said that that's some weird nine days back in my brain thing that just came out because I dressed very

you know bare times in my life I still do but I think there's a huge thing psychologically if it's something you're choosing as a kid to do as opposed to like an older person an adult being like yes wear less clothes oh I love it like that's weird

it's gonna do something weird to your brain yeah especially when you get to be an adult you know and then you can go either way I've definitely seen it where people are like don't touch me yes and humans should have touch or it's just like everyone touch me and you should have privacy I know just you know

a little bit in the middle somewhere it's probably good yeah yin yang yeah so that was described in bare face messiah which is a book about Elron Hubbard's life and all the lies he told it was also noted he would openly say that he was basically breeding

children this is a quote of his in the book bare face messiah yeah it was an indirect quote in the book he said it was an idea he had picked up from Nazi Germany he said Hitler was a madman but you should know as soon as somebody says Hitler was really bad

but like you should just go walk away from that person forever but nevertheless a genius in his own right and the Nazi youth was one of the smartest ideas he ever had with young people you had a blank slate you could write anything you wanted on it and it would be your writing that was his idea

to take young people and mold them into little Hubbard's he said he had girls because women were more loyal than men yeah again back to the religion women are always like I want to believe in God because usually men are like no I am the God exactly I mean and that's definitely what LRH did

as these girls grew older they were on the ship and they were starting to get married off to some of the younger boys on the ship and a lot of times including Janice's own sister she was not permitted to have her family there so he when Janice's sister was getting married on the ship

she asked if she could have her dad come on the ship and give her away and Elron was like taken aback by it he was so hurt that she would ask for her birth father because they had barely spent time with him so she didn't she apologized and let Elron walk her down the aisle

and her family wasn't there for the wedding or anything wow what a piece of shit I mean it's not great this is the broader sense so this is really like I was saying the experience would have been like for Shelly when she came on from the get go Shelly was utterly devoted

to Hubbard Janice recalls and socially awkward and shunned by the rest of her Commodore's messengers all teenaged girls so Grady is supposed to put out a third part of this Commodore's messengers series which has not come out yet but it would have been when Shelly was growing up

it sounds like it's good position for her because if she's super awkward around her teammates then how can she make friends and it seems like Elron Hubbard he don't want no friendships so she was just around him the whole time so that's probably her awkwardness the crux that actually did her well

and she just ended up being one of those kids who her makeup made her kind of enjoy this process as much as you could at eleven when you're shipped off to a boat and you want to do it around with an ashtray yeah you just like send your kid with an old guy on a boat

who among us has not done that with one of their kids Jesus this is from the Daily Mail she did an interview with them about this time period because they did a brief interview with her about Shelly being missing she said and Shelly was also a couple years younger than Janice

so she still was also seeing her from a little bit afar even though she was around for it she said Shelly was not one to step out of line she was always kind of in the background she was very loyal to Hubbert but she was not one that you could say take this project and run with it

because she wasn't experienced enough or had enough street smarts about her to make her own decisions because she was eleven I would assume yes and an entrepreneur like I took the bus the other day and I saw this sign that said entrepreneur school for kids and I was like no you're raising assholes

entrepreneur school for kids you're raising for yourself absolutely but like I don't know read a book with a class like have something to talk about this a shared experience I don't think you need to teach a kid how to buy and sell cars or something

okay so here's a little snippet about their education levels Shelly was not Janice said well educated she probably went to fifth grade maybe and that was it because when she came to the ship they did not have school they had three hours of reading

writing and arithmetic but that doesn't teach you anything about critical thinking or really how to exist as a human being so she learned basic reading and writing and she graduated from fifth grade maybe that is her entire education level and David Miskovich himself

I'm going to talk about him in episode two about his upbringing he himself only had a tenth grade education but when you look at that he's had two times as much education as Shelly so he's a real learned man in her life

she did not go to middle school in this article Shelly gained a reputation among the other girls for being moody and for taking so long over her hair makeup and outfits that often when the rest of the messengers were going ashore on a liberty or leaving the ship they would simply leave her behind

so she was just taking forever brushing her hair and didn't know what to wear and she was also younger did she ever get off the boat? I hope she got off the boat by herself not by herself she did eventually get off the boat because they stopped doing the boats

and they made Sea Orga a land thing but she was still trapped essentially she was just trapped on land instead of on a boat she probably felt crazy walking on ground I mean, yeah, I don't know if you develop sea legs as a child do you just land feel weird to you? I don't know

yeah, walking bow legged and all crazy so you can get a sleep on a water bed for sure you definitely do looking back, she admitted Shelley was a lot younger than the rest of us so she did have that disadvantage but she didn't have a very good relationship with the core messengers

so during that time, she was kind of isolated even within that group because she was a little bit younger and when you're a teenager two years is a huge gap where you're just like, ooh, this baby this gross baby I guess in that world, they still considered her

a full grown adult but you can't take that adolescence out of an adolescent no matter how hard you try you're still going to be a shitty teenage girl you can't do anything about that but as I mentioned, they started to pair off a little bit they didn't encourage people

to get married young but you kind of were encouraged because couples could get more work done they didn't actually encourage having babies very much he actually didn't like kids which is weird, you would think a cult would want lots of children to continue and it's weird, I think for Elron

he might be different in the sense of he wanted his life to be catered to he didn't really give a shit about what happened ultimately, he wanted to be taken care of so all of these people were literally just like his servants making sure his pants didn't touch the ground totally, and he got

all these people to put these ships together for him so he could sail around on them they got rid of the ships in some places that he could be comfortable in, he has mansions everywhere that are still waiting for him there's like six or seven different places where they have

the house is completely ready for him whenever he returns some of them are still waiting for him so we can go probably sleep there and is anybody going to know? oh yeah, they have hired security everywhere around their locations so you could do one of those

hide out and put it in the fridge, no one will know I actually think that they'd be one of some of the hardest buildings to get into for absolutely no reason there's like nothing going on inside but they have so much money, they can just hire security and a lot of times they have

the Sea Org is a group of slaves so a lot of times the Sea Org members just have to go do security duty on empty buildings yeah, you don't pay them during the 60s and 70s all the people who have defected and who are talking about it they made $10 a week or something

for their time I noticed something interesting in LA because their uniform is usually a white shirt and black bottoms and I've done some catering stuff here especially when I first moved to LA and they were like, no, all black do not do white shirt, black bottoms

and I was like, why? because they don't want us looking like Scientologists but it also works for Scientologists because it sort of makes them accessible in a way where it's just caterers, it's probably fine yeah, white shirt, black bottoms, I wish they had a cooler outfit because I've seen some beautiful looking young women

and I'm like, girls, show off that body with a dress I mean, they still make them wear sailor outfits they are still cosplaying sailors now, even though they don't have ships anymore that they operate on and they still use sea terms and stuff it's a whole ass thing

so they were starting to pair off and there was a small group they didn't get to see any other adolescents even when they would go to shore in different countries, they'd have their little time to be on land they weren't meeting people it wasn't a thing where you could meet somebody

and then text each other there was nothing, you are on shore somewhere yeah, you're in the Moroccan markets but holding hands and don't talk to anybody I mean, literally there's parts of her book that are that exact scenario and you can barely speak English yourself

let alone other languages even an English speaking person they'd be like, what are you talking about dianetic you've gone clear, excuse me yeah, they're like, you guys are weird get out of here and ultimately this is around the mid 70s

they started having troubles his government troubles would not escape him no matter how much he sailed and so the ships became kind of their own issue people were questioning who these boats were with all these children on them even back then, they're like are you running a sex ring

or what's happening here are you the CIA, there was all these questions about the boat so eventually he had to kind of come back to the states and bring the sea org to land and that's when clear water became the mecca for Scientology, they basically brought the ships

back to Florida and set up base in clear water and to this day that's where they are but they still call it the sea org their main core, their most dedicated people their literal slaves are still there and this is when David comes into the scene

he comes in and we're going to get into how David became a part of this whole thing in part two we're going to wrap up just by saying Janice Grady says there was a group of younger girls and there was not a big selection of guys the two best guys were probably Dave

Miss Gavage and Mark Yeager who went on to become a different executive one was short and one was tall Dave is the short one, he's like 5'4 aww and Tom Cruise is tiny too I know, I think that's why they're best friends aww they're like two knuckles fighting

oh yeah but there wasn't a big selection of guys and I remember a bunch of the girls competing to get Dave and Shelly wins the prize at the end of the day so next week we're going to get into how David ended up

in this situation, there's a lot more about him because his father defected he had to escape he wrote a book about the experience and also his niece, his brother's daughter escaped and she wrote a book about their life and sometimes escaping this thing

it isn't necessarily like a jeep ride through the jungle with a gun and sometimes just escaping is a mental snap of just saying I don't want this anymore and just walking out of the gates which is harder sometimes especially because in Scientology

a lot of them feel as though they can't do that and there's a whole entire wing of Scientology dedicated to following people who try to defect so they do actually have to sometimes even though in the grander scheme they could physically

just walk out and go help me, I'm being held captive yeah but nobody ever does that they have to like sneak out with like a bag over their head they do, there was actual escapes in that way including David Miscovich's own father

how to do something kind of similar to that and it makes sense because your whole family, the people you love your friends are all connected to this so it feels weird to just give them the finger and run out screaming into the street yeah, I mean it'd be like if I went into Scientology

like everybody would be like you're crazy, I'd probably have to sneak in there yeah exactly, they're all trying to get out you're trying to get in so yeah, that's the rough beginning of Shelley Miscovich's life we're going to talk about how

good old Dave got into Scientology and then how they met and where it went from there how did she win the prize, this awkward little girl I'm excited I know, it's so thrilling she's such a lucky lady well thank you Amber for joining me

thanks for having me, this was absolutely so fascinating yeah, it's fucked up man yeah and I like delving into the minds of these people excuse me, like why people make decisions because you can look at it from the outside and be like that's crazy

but if you delve into the psychology how they were raised, how their parents were raised it starts to kind of make a little sense yeah, which is basically why I created the show because if I can't look into how this happens I will myself go insane

truly madly insane and everyone will suffer and there's a lot of missing people there's like, I think state lines a lot of police don't report back to each other so there's a lot of serial killers out there right now more so one of the bigger risks

which we'll have many episodes about is social media has made it easy for kids to go missing because of predators having easy access to them and it's technically harder now to become a serial killer than it ever was because there's so much tracing

however, it's much easier to get access to children that's why YouTube recently turned off the comments for kids shows because people go in there and they're like hey little boy, little girl, you know we're gonna have a whole bunch of discussions about issues on YouTube, don't worry

so yeah, thanks for joining us please come back and hear the rest of Shelly's tale we can finally help her out of this if she wants to be helped and I don't know how to make that decision whether or not she even knows if she wants help but we're gonna try to figure it out

we can open the door but are you gonna walk out of it? come on Shelly, get out of there get out of here, come have an orgasm with us oh my god, can imagine how much fun she'll have the first time and have like a little cocktail take her to a jazz bar oh my god, ride a roller coaster, fuck sake

Shelly, come out alright, we'll see you, I'm Natalie Jean and you can find me at the Natty Jean on random you know, all the shit I'm Amber Nelson and I'm Amber Smelson on Instagram and Twitter

she smells great, bye! www.castnetwork.com