Mom tried to object. “Honey, I’m fine,” she said. “This is something I want to do.”
“Mother! I don’t want to hear it!” I said. “You are to get back to me by three p.m. If I don’t hear from you, I will show up with the police and the press.”
“Okay, honey,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”
I was shaking when I hung up the phone. Holy shit! I thought. I just threatened to call the police on the Church of Scientology!
Waiting for a call back from my mother was dreadful. Finally, at two thirty p.m., she called.
“Michelle,” she said calmly, “I have my things. They want you to meet me in Denny’s parking lot on Sunset Boulevard at three.”
“Denny’s?” I said. The pancake house? If the situation hadn’t been so serious, I would have laughed. “I’ll be there,” I said.
In exchange for being let go, Mom was ordered to sign a waiver stating that she understood if she ever spoke out against the church she would be fined $25,000 for each offense. They told her that if she didn’t sign it, they would not let her go. She signed it and asked for a copy. They refused. A security guard watched her pack her things. Sweet notes she had written to her roommates were confiscated. Her bags were searched and her iPad was wiped clean. She had hidden the cell phone between her underwear and her pants.
I pulled into Denny’s at three p.m. and saw Mom standing there with three boxes containing all her worldly possessions. A white van idled at the other end of the parking lot.
“Security?” I asked. Mom nodded.
I loaded her three boxes into the trunk of my car and started to pull away.
It was a perfect October afternoon. The sky was pastel blue, the sun was golden and a slight breeze blew.
As the ethics officers watched from the van, I opened my window, pumped my fist in the air and shouted at the top of my lungs: “FUCK YOU, SCIENTOLOGY!”
Freeeeeeeeeeeeeedom!
* * *
My mom and I had been through so much together over the years and I wasn’t about to leave without her with me. I had nothing, but everything. I couldn’t afford to support my family any longer, but I was in love and we were happy. In November, Charley found a home for all of us in the mountainous La Cañada section of Pasadena. It was a Spanish-style cottage surrounded by tall ponderosa pines and wisteria. The house was small enough to feel intimate and cozy but large enough to accommodate the kids, Mom, Charley and me. We became a real family there. Charley and I loved to cook dinner together and have the kids sit down at our long French farm table to eat and talk. Nothing was better than when Charley’s daughter, who was in vet school at UGA, came to visit. We felt complete. We had friends over. New friends. Our friends.
I began to feel some balance in my life. Savannah and the twins were thriving.
Mom was rediscovering such simple pleasures as watching TV and reading magazines. Sometimes she just stood on the patio behind the house and seemed to be drinking in her freedom.
My oldest son, Sage, who was by now a teenager, chose to live part-time with his father in Valencia. The influence of school and friends won out, so I had to settle for visitations every other weekend. I picked him up on Friday after school and dropped him back off on Monday mornings. We shared a special mother-son dinner once a week. It was hardly ideal, but it was what my son wanted. There was still a lot of bitterness between Sean and me, and that was hard on all of us, but especially on Sage. I felt like I had failed him and I lived in fear that Sean would get him involved in the church. Nothing I said could change his mind and I didn’t want to lose him, so we made the best of every moment we were together.
The days of multiple nannies and personal shoppers and fancy cars were behind me, but I didn’t care. Except for the situation with Sage, I was happier than I had ever been. I loved being home to make lunches for the kids and walk them to school in the morning. I listened to music as I ran along the winding streets of our neighborhood. Charley and I sat at the fireside in our study and read passages from a book by Mark Nepo, Finding Inner Courage. In many ways, I felt as if I had recaptured the girl I was when I used to sit at my grandparents’ cabin, admiring the simple things in life. The blooming flowers. The chirping birds. Things I had taken for granted for too long while I chased the superficial dreams I had been taught by the church.
All that fall I had been involved in mediation talks with the Department of Corporations. A judge had ruled that the word “fraud” be taken out of the equation and ordered the mediation to determine restitution for the movie investors. The talks led to a settlement, five days before Christmas, of $17.4 million, the portion of the $23 million in investments that investors had yet to recover. Only half of the seventy-eight investors were my clients. Dror and Scott Foulk, the former vice president of my insurance firm, had brought the others in.
I learned that Dror had filed for bankruptcy—for the third time. That meant his creditors were prohibited from going after his personal assets, so he was effectively off the hook.
“The agreement resolves the department’s civil action alleging the offer and sale of unqualified securities in violation of state law,” the Department of Corporations wrote in a press release. I breathed a sigh of relief. All I had ever wanted was that my clients be reimbursed for their losses.
I rang in the year 2014 with a toast to the future. I had so much to be thankful for. My beautiful children, my loyal partner, my mom’s safety. I vowed to put the nightmare behind me and work day and night to restore my insurance business and repay my clients in full. It was not to be.
That same month, the state Department of Insurance filed a sixty-four-page accusation against me to revoke my insurance license.
Shortly after my attorneys informed me, I got a call from my friend Michael, who said he’d been contacted by the state investigator in charge of both the Department of Corporations and the Department of Insurance cases.
The investigator told Michael that he had in his possession a copy of a recent e-mail exchange between Michael and me, and he had a few questions about it. Michael asked the investigator how he’d gotten access to my private e-mail account. With a subpoena? If so, for what? he asked. The investigator told Michael there was no subpoena; he’d received the e-mail in an unmarked envelope delivered to his office.
The e-mail exchange, which was innocuous, had happened two years after Celeste left my company—and both my server and e-mail accounts had been changed since then. Obviously, my new account had been breached. I contacted my attorneys and they agreed that something wasn’t right. Hacking was illegal, whether it was by the church, an individual or the investigator for the State of California.
My attorney’s IT experts went back to work. They discovered that three of the last five IP addresses that had accessed my e-mail account were not mine.
When is this going to end?
The investigator also contacted some of my former clients who had remained loyal friends. They informed me that he seemed to have a peculiar interest in keeping the heat on me. He’d called me a “beautiful psychopath” and told some of them I had money hidden in a Swiss bank account. Hardly.
Most disturbing, he told my clients he’d received information in an unmarked white envelope that proved I was a criminal. He said he was personally going to see to it that I went to jail.
* * *
In March, my mom came upstairs holding my old cell phone, which I’d given her when I changed my number. She had just received a text from the carrier noting that my contact information had been changed.
“I didn’t do that. Did you?” Mom asked.
“I didn’t change anything,” I said.
I immediately called the carrier to ask for an explanation. They told me a woman claiming to be me had called earlier that morning to “update my billing address” to a post office box number. To do that, she needed my birth date and so
cial security number, which she did indeed have. She gave my former home telephone number as a contact number, and she knew the names of my children, whose phones were also on my account. That narrowed the list of suspects to a handful of people who knew me intimately, and all were Scientologists.
I remembered that, a few months back, when I hadn’t received a bill, I’d checked with the carrier and was told the bill had been sent to a different address, a post office box. I had just assumed it was their mistake and changed the address back to mine. Now I wondered.
“Can you check your records to see if the new box number is the same as it was that time?” I asked.
“Of course,” the representative said.
I heard the clicking of her keyboard, and then a sigh.
“I’m afraid it is,” she said.
“Why would someone do that?” I asked.
But in truth I already knew. The bill showed the numbers of everyone I called and texted during the month.
“The church,” Mom said.
“Yes,” I said. “The church.”
At first I was angry, but then I felt the same sense of satisfaction I did each time I found a link to the church that confirmed my suspicions. I wasn’t crazy. Given all the pieces, I came to the only conclusion that made sense: They were following me. They had stolen my digital profile. My client information. My e-mails. And they had obviously attempted to steal my phone records. They were trying to destroy me. “The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.”
What I didn’t understand was how the government of the State of California allowed itself to be influenced by an organization that was known for being corrupt and vindictive.
That was terrifying.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Criminal Charges
I couldn’t afford to fight the Department of Insurance’s case in court, so I was forced to agree to give up my license to practice for five years. As relieved as I felt to have my legal problems behind me—as far as I knew, anyway—losing my license meant I could never recover my business. Insurance was all I’d ever known. I didn’t have a college degree. I didn’t have the money to start a new business. How would I ever repay my clients if I couldn’t collect the insurance residuals I’d been counting on when we’d agreed to the trust? How would I support my children and my mom?
Charley tried to comfort me by saying she would always take care of us, but I couldn’t possibly ask her to do more than she already was. I felt like a total failure. Everything I’d worked my whole life for was gone.
I tried to remind myself that I still had Charley and the kids, so what else mattered? But I constantly fought feelings of worthlessness. What did I have to offer anyone anymore?
I spent my time trying to be the best mother and partner I could be. I cooked and cleaned and saw to it that nothing in the house was out of place. I pasted on a fake smile, but inside I was seething. I hated my life. I hated Dror and Sean and Celeste and the state’s investigator. I hated the church. I became difficult to live with. Charley couldn’t leave a sock on the floor without me making a comment, and the children’s manners at dinner had better be perfect or else. I ran in the mornings to try to work off some of the smoldering resentment I felt, but it didn’t do much.
Charley said I was becoming mean. She begged me to see someone. She said everyone was walking on eggshells and our home was no longer happy. I needed professional help.
I finally gave in and took her advice. I made an appointment with a psychologist and committed to regular appointments. Over time, I started to allow myself hope for a brighter future.
I’d had nine more months of relative peace—except for the strange cars that still idled outside our home, but I had grown accustomed to that.
Then our home was raided on that October morning in 2014. I still didn’t know what they expected to find in my house that day, but I remembered all too well how the agents had sneaked up onto my property under the cover of a gray dawn and terrorized my children, my mother and me.
After tearing my house apart, all they could say was the state had been “informed” that I had property in my possession proving I’d committed a felony. Informed by whom? And what property exactly? The state’s investigator had been there that day. I didn’t want him in my house and asked that he be made to wait outside while the officers did their search. I wanted to scream at him. Enough! What do you think you know? What was in my possession that pointed to a crime? Nothing. Because I had not committed a crime. I have never committed a crime!
* * *
I had to get away from Los Angeles. I felt like the place had eaten me alive. Everywhere I turned there was a reminder of Scientology. The buildings are everywhere. The light blue tops and dark blue bottoms that make up the Sea Org uniforms. Billboards recruiting members. Eight-pointed Scientology crosses (representing Hubbard’s “Eight Dynamics” of life). Bumper stickers, some of which actually made me laugh—“Lord Xenu is my homeboy” or “Scientology: Out of This World” . . . I didn’t have a business to keep me in California anymore, and the house in La Cañada, which all of us had once adored, didn’t seem safe after the police invasion. I was tired of being watched and hacked and followed. I just wanted to live peacefully with my family.
Atlanta had become like a second home during the time we’d spent there for Twist. Our best friends, Pat and Scott, had a home there. The kids loved it and Charley had kept an office there. When the lease was up on the house, we moved to Georgia. Mom had an apartment within walking distance of us, the first time in thirty years she had a place of her own. Charley and I joined the local Episcopal church, a place where there was no judgment or ridicule. People didn’t write one another up or instigate hate campaigns.
Our new environment was rustic, with lush trees, tall grass, walking paths and horse farms. There were no eight-pointed Scientology crosses to be found. I loved being surrounded by nature. I finally felt at peace. The only drawback was that Sage had decided to stay in Los Angeles with his father. He was old enough to make his own decision, so I agreed. But I vowed to see him every other weekend, whether that meant me going to him or him coming to us.
It was during one of those trips to Los Angeles to see Sage, in September 2015, two months after the move, eleven months after the raid on my house, that I learned I was going to be arrested. I had settled with the Department of Corporations. Given up my license to the Department of Insurance. It still wasn’t enough. What the investigator had vowed would happen—what he’d told my friends he was determined to accomplish—was coming true. The Los Angeles County District Attorney was charging me criminally. The search of my home for “proof I had committed a felony” had yielded nothing, but apparently the state felt as if it had enough damning evidence to charge me with a crime.
I had just landed at LAX and was parking my rental car in a hotel parking lot when I got the call from Dan Nixon, the criminal attorney Steve Cooley had recommended when my house was searched. Dan told me that both Dror and I were being charged with fraud in connection with what the government insisted was a Ponzi scheme. Both he and Steve were caught off guard by the criminal charges, he said. I burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” Dan said. “Please try to stay calm. You have to stay focused. We’ll figure this out.”
I couldn’t calm down. I hated him at that moment, and I heaped all my misguided anger on him. “I thought you told me this was all going away!” I cried. “I agreed to a settlement for something I didn’t do because you told me to agree to it! I gave up my professional license. My whole career!” I screamed, ending the call.
For one fleeting moment, I thought about going to my hotel room and ending my life.
Instead, I checke
d in, went to my room and collapsed on the bed. I wondered if I had any fight left in me. I was tired of fighting. Tired of trying to do right and being accused of terrible wrongs.
I called Charley and wept some more.
“What about my children?” I cried. “They will grow up knowing their mother was arrested. That monster will get custody. What about their futures? This is so unfair!”
She tried to calm me, but it was no use.
I thought about how Charley had taken care of us so well and so selflessly after I’d lost everything. She had given up so much to protect me. To protect us. She had done more than I could imagine almost anyone doing. But would she be able to get through this now with me? Could I expect our love to survive?
What about my former clients, the people who had trusted me, believed in me? I wondered. How would I ever repay them if I went to jail? Hundreds of people had been hurt, and for what? Because the Church of Scientology decided I was an enemy and spread lies about me? The government had even used the same words that my fellow Scientologists used in their reports to the church.
The criminal case made headlines. A spokeswoman for the district attorney was quoted as saying, “It’s certainly one of the largest Ponzi schemes that I can recall.”
My life was at its lowest point. It was hard for me to get out of bed or even eat. My family would tell me that everything was going to be okay, but it was not okay. Charley knew that I was not pulling out of my depression, so she called my sister and asked her to fly in to see me.
When Jess arrived, I collapsed into her arms and cried harder than I had ever cried. I was able to tell Jess things that I couldn’t say to anyone else because everyone else wanted to solve the problem for me. Charley wanted me to buck up and fight. My mom was angry and overwhelmed with guilt. My attorneys didn’t want to hear the crying. I knew Jess couldn’t fix my problems, but she listened. I was able to be honest with her. I was able to tell her that I didn’t want my children visiting me in jail or that I didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. I was able to say what I was holding so close to my heart. Everyone was better off with me dead. That brutal honesty was my first step up. Saying it out loud made me hear how low I had actually gone.
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