Our group included Kirstie Alley, Anne Archer, Leah Remini and a few other high-profile church members. A security detail ushered us upstairs and led us to a conference room a few steps from the elevator. Going beyond that boundary would have required a higher security clearance. The conference room was spacious and tastefully decorated with dark cherrywood tables and accents and bookcases filled with volumes of Scientology texts. A portrait of L. Ron Hubbard hung on the wall.
We sat around a large conference table and made small talk as we waited for the briefing to begin. I was starstruck. It was a real honor to be part of this prestigious group and showed that I was deeply trusted by the church.
After a few minutes, the conference room doors swung open and three of the top church executives strode in. Tommy Davis, the church’s spokesman, who is also Anne Archer’s son, did most of the talking. He said the BBC was filming a documentary and the church had chosen us for on-camera interviews. John Sweeney, the reporter, was hostile, so we needed to be briefed beforehand, he said.
Davis passed around the notorious Black PR Book, a thick loose-leaf binder with pictures and dossiers of enemies. Sweeney’s page was dog-eared. We were each handed dossiers stamped “Confidential,” with “intel” about Sweeney’s alleged criminal activity and mental problems. Investigators from the OSA had dug up the information, Davis said. None of us questioned it. The word of the church was sacrosanct and we were honor-bound to never question a Scientologist.
For most of the afternoon, we were coached on how to conduct ourselves with Sweeney. Our job was to present a positive front for the camera, to show that we were successful, happy people whose lives had changed for the better because of Scientology. Should Sweeney challenge us with typical questions posed by cynical journalists—about brainwashing, and conspiracies, and physical abuse by church executives, or anything else negative—we were to be indignant and dismissive.
“You know what to do,” Davis said. “Dead-agent all of his questions.” “Dead-agenting” was church slang for “attacking the attacker.” Our job was to deflect the questions and destroy the source.
The next morning, our group met at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood, where the interview was scheduled to take place. We were served a sumptuous breakfast and given a quick refresher course before Tommy Davis announced that the television crew was setting up in a conference room upstairs. We finished our meal and filed up to a reception area adjacent to the room where the reporter was waiting. You could feel the electricity among us. Everyone knew that the “Get Sweeney” operation came from the top, and the team was ready to oblige our leader.
Anne Archer was first to be interviewed, and she gave a commanding performance. When the reporter asked her about the church’s reputation for practicing mind control, she leaned in to him and asked angrily, “Do I look brainwashed to you? How dare you!” I caught a glimpse of Sweeney through a cracked door and felt a little sorry for him. He was about to be struck by the full force of the church’s wrath. He wouldn’t even know what hit him.
My moment of empathy quickly passed, though, and was replaced by another thought: This man was trying to hurt us. He had no interest in presenting a balanced report. He was our enemy and enemies had to be destroyed. When it was Kirstie’s turn to sit in the chair opposite Sweeney, she taunted him for asking what she called his “inappropriate questions” about David Miscavige. “And I think that’s probably why he wouldn’t do an interview with you. Just like I wouldn’t ask you if you’re still molesting children.” There was a lot of behind-the-scenes laughing and fist pumping after that one.
It pained me now to think about how we’d mocked Sweeney back then and did everything we could to diminish him. As he traveled between churches in Los Angeles and Clearwater, Florida, conducting his interviews, church members followed and goaded him. Davis was the lead soldier charged with getting under Sweeney’s skin. He and others videotaped the reporter’s every move. At one point, Davis and his entourage confronted Sweeney with a camera when he returned to his hotel at midnight. Sweeney had never said where he was staying. On another occasion, Davis’s video crew ambushed the reporter while he was interviewing a former Scientologist in a parking garage. A third time, sensing that Sweeney’s nerves were fraying, Davis stuck the camera in the reporter’s face and shouted at him. As Scientology cameras rolled, the reporter lost his cool, exploding in a cringeworthy, red-faced rage. We rushed copies of the video to BBC bosses as proof of Sweeney’s unprofessionalism and instability. And we posted them on YouTube, also, for its millions of viewers.
Sweeney was a seasoned journalist who had covered conflicts around the world, but it took the Church of Scientology to test his mettle. For months after the on-camera confrontation between Sweeney and Davis, the church played the video at meetings and events. Those of us who had participated boasted about our roles in the mission. The church later used the footage in its own documentary on the BBC’s alleged prejudicial reporting tactics.
I knew how far the church would go to exact revenge. I had come to know a merciless church. Not even David Miscavige’s closest allies were exempt from retribution if they were suspected of disloyalty—real or imagined. His top executives told of being punished with incarceration in a place called “The Hole,” an ant-infested, sweltering set of double-wide trailers on the church’s 520-acre compound in San Jacinto, California, where they were confined—for weeks or sometimes years—and forced to do hard labor, sleep on the floor, eat slop and undergo intense interrogation until they collapsed. Even worse, Miscavige’s wife, Shelly, was banished to a California mountain compound more than a decade ago and still hasn’t been seen in public, allegedly as punishment for displeasing her husband. If the leader’s own wife and top commanders were subjected to such cruel and inhumane punishment, the poor BBC reporter never had a chance.
Sweeney’s film Scientology and Me documented the church’s campaign against him. He later wrote about his experience in the UK newspaper The Independent: “When I went to the wars for a living, I was gassed, shot at, shelled, bombed and had two sticks of dynamite shoved up my nose,” he said. “But never did I feel such fear for my grip on reality as I did investigating the Church of Scientology.”
Now they were coming after me. As Jon Perkins said, it would be hard as hell for me to prove it.
The idea of inevitable confrontations struck fear into my heart. It would be one woman—me—against the State of California and the mighty Church of Scientology, with its black heart and billion-dollar bank account. How could I possibly win that fight?
I looked from Jon to Steve, my eyes pleading for some consolation, waiting to hear how we would get out of this mess, that everything was going to be all right, as I’d promised my children hours before. But Steve didn’t say anything like that. He was frowning and grim-faced.
“Look,” he said. “The church may be behind this and they may not. But now we’ve got allegations of a crime committed. We need to focus on the accusations, not the church. And we need to bring in a criminal attorney.”
“My God,” I said. “This is never going to end. It just keeps getting worse. I don’t know how much more I can take.”
I felt a sense of doom as I left the meeting. Yesterday had been such a good day. No unfamiliar cars outside—at least not that I could see. No odd phone calls or hang-ups. No strangers showing up at the door, pretending to have the wrong address. I remember thinking that maybe my church friends had decided enough time and money had been spent trying to get to me. It had been a pipe dream.
CHAPTER ONE
The Beginning
As I fought against folding under the weight of the threat of criminal investigation, I found myself thinking about my roots. I wondered how different my life might have been if my family had never moved to California.
I was heading into my junior year of high school when my stepfather relocated us from the small city of Norman, O
klahoma, to Los Angeles, where he could pursue his new job. My mother married Steve when I was in the fifth grade. This was her fourth marriage and his first. They met at a neighborhood bar where my mother worked nights as a cocktail waitress following her day job as a dental assistant and a student at Rose State.
Before that, it was just me, my mom and my younger brother, Jeremy. We lived in a cramped apartment, all we could afford. Our living room was furnished with a rocking chair and a wobbly rolltop desk. The desk doubled as a stand for a small black-and-white television set topped with foil-wrapped rabbit ears. We ate our meals on the floor, sitting atop a spread-out blanket. My brother loved to complain: Why couldn’t we have a table like normal people? Mom made light of it and scolded him to “get his knees off the table.” Jeremy didn’t laugh. But we did.
My mother was always chasing a dream. In so many ways, she and I were more like best friends than mother and daughter. Often, I acted the adult to her child. I didn’t mind. I was born an old soul. Childhood games were of little interest to me. I had my own dreams to keep me occupied. In Norman, the highest a girl could aspire to was to marry a doctor, but I knew that living in someone else’s shadow wasn’t for me. From a very early age I was determined to do something great with my life, and because I came from modest means I knew I would have to work very hard to get there. Whether that meant becoming a surgeon to save people’s hearts, or a lawyer to spare someone from a death sentence, my purpose would be about helping others.
I had a lot of responsibility growing up. My parents, high school sweethearts from the small town of Sparks, Nevada, split when I was three and Jeremy was two. We lived with our father as Mom started a new life with an abusive man I hated. At twenty-five, Dad was raising two toddlers and working long hours at the town’s electric plant. We were often shuffled off to our grandparents’ home, which I loved. Mom’s second marriage ended after six months and we began seeing her more often after that. Soon Dad remarried, and he and his new wife had my half sister, Jessica. Jeremy and I went back to live with our mother. Not long after that, she reconnected with an old beau and decided we should move to Oklahoma to be near him. That marriage also failed. My mother seemed to always be searching for the perfect marriage just like my grandparents had for sixty-two years.
By the time I was in the third grade and Jeremy was in second, I was expected to take charge when Mom wasn’t around, which was a lot of the time. Between taking college courses and working two jobs, she was away more than she was home, and it fell to me to fix dinner for Jeremy and me and make sure we got to bed on time. On the nights I was too frightened to go to sleep, I called my grandmother in Sparks and she read us bedtime stories.
I’m not sure how things would have turned out if it hadn’t been for my grandparents. I longed for summer to arrive so we could stay with them, in a real house, with proper furniture, and dinner on the table every night. My father lived nearby, so I got to visit with him and my baby sister when I was there.
Dad was a good man but strict with Jeremy and me. His rules became stifling and I chose to visit during the fun weekends to the lake or camping trips.
One summer, when I was visiting them, I mentioned to my grandmother that we couldn’t afford to shop at Harold’s, the department store back home where the girls who were well-off got their preppy plaid skirts and Izod shirts with crocodile insignias. My grandmother went out and bought plain pastel-colored golf-style shirts and sewed crocodiles she’d cut from Izod socks over the left breast pockets, assuring me that no one would be able to tell the difference. My grandmother was always trying to make up for the things that Mom missed because she was too wrapped up in her own life to notice the deficits in ours. I think she felt guilty that her daughter could be so neglectful of us. My mother didn’t see that her neglect was taking a toll on my brother and me. She was trying to provide for two children with very little help. My mother and I were more alike than we were different. I didn’t want her to know how scared and lonely I was as a child, and she didn’t want me to know how scared she was raising two children on her own. We both put on a brave face for Jeremy and the outside world.
Eventually, Mom knew that Jeremy needed a full-time parent. She decided to send him to Nevada to live with our dad, and I chose to remain with Mom because I didn’t want to leave her alone. I needn’t have worried. A short time later, she married Steve.
My life changed after that. Steve was a former Olympic swimmer, six years younger than Mom, and a successful land agent for an oil company. He moved us into a nice home in one of the newer developments in Norman. We had color TV and cable. For the first time I could remember, Mom and I didn’t have to bring a calculator to the grocery store and we always had enough money for gas and my cheerleading uniform.
Steve was a willing father figure and he gave me a sense of steadiness and security I hadn’t known before. If Mom couldn’t make it to back-to-school night or to a weekend football game to watch me cheer, sometimes Steve sat in for her. His success meant Mom didn’t need to work two jobs anymore, so she was home more often. Most nights, the three of us had dinner together, and someone was always there to help with my homework. I didn’t feel like the poor, deprived kid anymore. I wasn’t embarrassed to have friends over. I was an “A” student and popular with my peers. For the first time in my life, I could just be a kid.
Then, in my sophomore year of high school, life and all its uncertainty intervened. In 1986 the oil market crashed and more than a hundred thousand jobs in Oklahoma vanished, Steve’s included. At first, I was too busy having fun with my friends to pay attention to what was happening in our household. What I did notice was the growing friction between my mother and Steve. They began arguing a lot. They usually took their differences to their bedroom and shut the door, but I could tell from the pitch of their muffled voices that my happy family was unraveling. My idyllic life was about to change.
As spring arrived, Steve was offered a good position purchasing land for a storage company. I was elated until I heard it was fifteen hundred miles away, in Los Angeles. Mom reluctantly agreed to go. The thought of leaving my life and my friends was devastating to me, but Steve thought the move was exactly what I needed.
“If you’re looking for something to make you great,” he said, “you have to get out of Oklahoma, because you won’t find it here.”
I’d never been to California. I pictured streets lined with palm trees, surfers riding aqua waves and movie star sightings everywhere. As intimidating as it was to think of starting over at fifteen, I was also excited to experience this whole new world. But the transition wouldn’t be easy.
Los Angeles life seemed superficial and narcissistic compared with the traditional values we had left behind. When I think of Norman now, I recall a college town with football at the center of life, everyone flocking to the stadium for weekend games. Valencia, on the other hand, was a burgeoning Los Angeles suburb where the world turned on how you looked and how much money you had.
On my first day of school, I entered a new reality. The girls wore itty-bitty skirts with slouchy boots and tight tops designed to show off their cleavage. Handbags costing more than my first car dangled from their arms. I had on long khaki walking shorts, a buttoned-up oxford-style shirt and leather flats. The way they looked me up and down, slowly and with disdain, said everything. It was like a scene from the movie Mean Girls. When I got home that day, I cried to my mom that I might as well have been an alien from another planet. The kids drove Porsches and BMW convertibles to school! I was never going to fit in. I wanted to go back to Oklahoma.
“We’re not going anywhere,” she said.
Once we were settled in, Mom went to work as a consultant for a company called Sterling Management, where she gave seminars and sold management-training programs to health care professionals, predominantly doctors and dentists, who wanted to learn how to run the business side of their practices more efficiently. The positi
on involved extensive travel, so Mom was gone a lot. Steve was usually on the road for his new company too, sometimes for two or three weeks at a time.
It quickly became obvious that our second chance wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped. Mom spent more and more time at work, even when Steve wasn’t away. She was taking self-improvement courses at night. Courses like “How to Communicate” and “Personal Values and Integrity.” Steve complained about her attitude. She was becoming distant, and more independent in a way that didn’t sit well with him.
I didn’t like the changes I saw in my mother either. She adopted a strange, unemotional way of speaking that didn’t sound like my mother at all. She even began using words and expressions I didn’t understand.
For instance:
“Michelle, you and I need a comm cycle about this.”
I roll my eyes impatiently. A comm cycle?
“What’s that?”
Mom acts as if I should know this new lingo.
“It means, ‘We need to talk.’”
I sigh in exasperation.
“Then why don’t you just say that, Mom?”
Or:
“Michelle, we have to work on our 2D.”
Here we go again: “What’s a 2D?”
Mom raises her eyebrow. “The Second Dynamic. It means family,” she says.
“Huh?”
And:
“That is so enturbulating.”
“Enturbu-what?”
“Enturbulating, Michelle. Upsetting!”
Perfectly Clear Page 2