Jess looked at me, held my hand and said, “Chell, if you choose to leave us, you will let them win. You will let the truth be buried, you will let your children fall into the grip of Scientology and you will show Charley that love did not prevail. Do not let them win.”
Those words stung like ice and woke me up. I felt the fire in my core reignite. I had truth on my side! I would not let them win or take my children from me, and I sure as hell would not let Charley ever believe that our love was not worth the fight to me!
After that, I spent my days combing through legal documents, check registers, e-mails—anything to help my attorneys prove my innocence. I started my mornings with long walks in the wildflower meadow near our home waiting for some kind of message or epiphany. Why was this happening? What was I supposed to be seeing? One day, I stopped and sat on a stone with my legs crossed, my face to the sun, and closed my eyes. I saw my grandmother and she was smiling. I heard her speaking. Be open, Michelle. Be who you are. Be kind. You will be fine. When I opened my eyes, I felt an urge to take a selfie. When I got home and looked at the picture, I saw what looked like an angel standing over my shoulder. I knew I wasn’t in this alone. It reminded me of the daily calls from Charley’s second oldest sister wanting to know that I was okay or the constant messages of inspiration that Kathy Ridenour sent my way. I could feel something happening in the universe. It was almost like a quiet hum of prayer, almost out of range, but I could feel it. It was that hum of love that kept me going when days clouded over.
During the discovery process for my case, I finally learned that the state’s interest in me had indeed begun with an anonymous letter. It was written in March 2011, eight months after Mary Mauser had confronted me about being gay, three months after the birthday party where the other Scientology woman came out to me, two months after one of them wrote the report at Flag in Florida accusing me of promoting homosexuality, one month after Dror had returned from Flag, where he’d been summoned for a Sec Check.
The letter, dated March 8, 2011, read:
We wish to remain anonymous as we fear retribution from the parties involved in this multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme which has bilked investors out of millions of dollars! Most of these investors are retired seniors and have no idea their money has been squandered away to support the lifestyles and business ventures of these guilty parties. Investor money was spent on expensive cars, living in expensive homes and having lavish offices at Paramount Studios.
The scheme dates back to 2007, maybe longer, whereby these parties sold unregistered securities under the guise of production loans to try and skate regulations and give the appearance these investments were 100 percent secure. Investors were promised returns of 10 percent up to 12 percent annually and were provided with unsecured promissory notes which the issuing parties knowingly could not pay and didn’t have assets to back. They convinced earlier investors to roll their original production loans or investments over into future movie and live stage projects and paid interest using newer investor money to older investors, which now numbers well over 100 investors.
What frightened me was that what had started with an anonymous letter from someone I firmly believed was a Scientologist had carried through, almost with the same wording, to the day’s headlines.
How did this vendetta get so far? I asked myself. I thought the justice system would protect me. Far from it. It had victimized me just as the church had.
Over the next year, I provided the State of California with definitive proof that I had done nothing wrong. I offered up bank statements I’d found in discovery, showing how Dror had transferred millions of my clients’ money from the intended movie investment account to his own personal and business accounts. I volunteered to be interviewed by the DA and answered every question asked of me. I learned that the state’s investigator had not turned over anything that had been confiscated from my home. As it turned out, much of it would have helped my case. In finally going through the boxes, we discovered he’d held back evidence that would have proved my innocence. What was his motive? Was he somehow connected to the church? Was he being paid to incriminate me? Was he under pressure from his bosses to get me charged? Whatever the reason, the damage was done and, as far as I know, without consequences for him.
On September 21, 2016, the Los Angeles County District Attorney offered me immunity in exchange for my testimony against Dror. I accepted the offer.
My friend Jonathan has a theory, and it wasn’t lost on me in the midst of all this. He said that during his many years of working with prosecutors, he’d known many who were interested only in getting at the truth. But he also knew others who would do anything to save face and protect their reputations, even if it meant sacrificing the innocent.
It sounded a lot like a church I knew.
On March 30, 2017, the state dismissed seventy of the seventy-two charges against Dror based on the statute of limitations. The other two were dropped for lack of proof of intent to defraud. He got off scot-free because of a technicality . . . but he will have to live with his guilt.
My charges were dropped—not on a technicality but, in the words of the court, “in the interest of justice.” It took six years, and in the end truth prevailed. I was innocent.
Finally, I am free. Free for my children. Free to love the person I do. Free to start over.
Meanwhile, revelations about the church and its powerful influence, even over institutions that are meant to protect us, continue to emerge. What happened to me is over, but I worry about other victims—people who may not have the stamina, the support or the resources that I had for the fight of my life. Just recently I was reading about the lagging investigation of four women who claim they were sexually assaulted by the actor and longtime Scientologist Danny Masterson. One of the women, a Scientologist herself, filed a police report with the LAPD in 2004, but the case was derailed after dozens of Scientologists filed affidavits refuting the story. Masterson has denied any allegations of rape and claims the encounters in question were consensual. What sent chills down my spine was an excerpt from a letter that one of Masterson’s alleged victims sent to LAPD chief Charlie Beck, which was published in the Underground Bunker, a blog by investigative journalist Tony Ortega. The victim wrote that an investigator handling the case admitted to her that she was worried about the investigation because “some LAPD officers are very friendly with the church of Scientology.”
The Masterson case has since been sent up for further investigation to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office—the same office that charged me.
The Underground Bunker reported that the victims have told their stories to Leah Remini—the actress who so boldly left the church, then bravely wrote a book about her experience—for her A&E series, Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. But the district attorney stepped in and requested that the episode be held until the investigation is complete and they decide whether to charge Masterson. I’m not holding my breath, but I hope the women get the chance to tell their stories publicly. Every person who steps up takes power away from the omnipotent church and makes it that much more difficult for them to hurt the next person. And the next.
* * *
On April 7, 2017, I was on a plane from New York to Los Angeles. The ride was bumpy and I prayed to God to keep me safe. When I opened my eyes again, I looked to my left and saw Leah Remini.
I’d met Leah through the years at church functions, and we had both been part of the Black Propaganda campaign against the BBC reporter years earlier, but we didn’t really know each other. I’d followed her very public break with the church and knew about her successful television show showcasing other victims of Scientology. I admired her.
I got up all my courage and approached her, fearful she might reject me. She couldn’t have been nicer. She had lost the hard edge she’d learned (as I had) in the church and her eyes were soft and warm. I quickly told her my story and she li
stened intently. We hugged and vowed to talk again. I hope we do. In the name of truth. And justice.
AFTERWORD
Sunshine pours through my window this morning, brightening a bowl of oranges on the kitchen table. Quiet has settled over the house. In a little while, I’ll head to the park with Charley and the kids, but I am enjoying this brief stillness after the quagmire of legal problems and uncertainty that had become my life.
For so many years, I was afraid of silence and all it connoted. A dearth of noise meant inaction, lack of progress, failure, laziness. What I never understood, until now, was the real reason silence was so challenging.
“We cannot see our reflection in running water,” according to an ancient Chinese proverb. “It is only in still water that we can see.”
In the quiet, you must confront your thoughts. Silence requires the maintenance of an inner life. You are alone with yourself. Appearances matter little. Professional success is irrelevant. What bubbles up are your memories and feelings, specifically how you feel about yourself and your loved ones. And sometimes you think about your place in the universe.
I lost nearly everything after I left the Church of Scientology. As I set out to leave, people in the church warned me that my business and personal reputation were already under siege and I should expect the worst.
And the furies did pounce. Even now, when I have proven myself to be innocent of any wrongdoing, I still read comments on the Internet by Scientologists who want me, in the words of L. Ron Hubbard, “utterly destroyed.”
Within the swirl of darkness that enveloped me, however, my faith in humankind remained intact. I could not have made it through the degrading days in court without my two priests, Reverend Ed Bacon and Reverend Zelda Kennedy, who held me tight within their loving embrace. Friends like Martie and Simon, who sat by my side and entwined their warm and calming hands with my shaking ones. I have been extremely heartened by the actions of my clients. Before the charges against me were dropped, they refused to testify against me and banded together to petition the state to leave me alone and allow me to rebuild my shattered life. They attended my court hearings, and wrote letters of support, and signed sworn affidavits testifying to my honesty and integrity. They continued to believe in me when it must have been hard to do so. Out of all the people that I knew in the insurance industry, only two never walked away. Tracey Carragher and Sam Watson were constantly looking for ways to support me, and when I finally asked for support, Tracey and Sam were right by my side. I became witness to this amazing energy of love that not only transformed my heart but also guided me through the roughest of days.
In a letter to the district attorney, my former client Kathy Ridenour, who is a spokesperson for the group, wrote: “The vast majority of people involved with this case are fully supportive of Ms. Seward. There may be 5 percent who want some sort of revenge, but should we allow this small of a group to dictate this case? We certainly hope not. That would be a travesty and a tragedy.” She has been one of the angels who sustained me over these torturous months and years.
The playwrights of ancient Greece well understood the elements of tragedy. To learn, Aeschylus said, one must suffer. The legal assaults sullied my professional reputation. The news media accounts of these investigations humiliated me.
The days of driving Bentleys and renting helicopters on a whim are far behind me. I am broke now. I have used every last asset to reimburse clients. I am far from being able to say they have been repaid. But my loyalty to them will remain unbroken until every penny of what they lost has been recovered.
My greatest loss, however, has nothing to do with my pride or fortune. By walking away from the church, I turned my back on an entire life—friendships and associations that were decades old. In doing so, I also rejected the ethical foundation that had guided my life. I was a ship unmoored. My entire adult existence was founded on the guidelines of Scientology. I thought I was progressing toward a higher state of being. I believed that the church was a righteous force in society. We were going to save the world! Then it was gone. All of it. My beliefs. My values. My purpose. I had to figure out which parts of me were my brainwashed self and what was authentic. Who was I? And who did I want to be? The questions both excited and angered me. Excited because I could finally explore thoughts and feelings that had been asleep for more than twenty years. Angry because I had allowed myself to be conned by a so-called religion based on science fiction, absurdities and deception.
I left when I no longer felt that the church played any positive role, when I realized its doctrines—such as rejecting gay people and others following lifestyles it would not recognize—were destructive and exploitative. But what was my plan B? What was I supposed to believe in afterward?
I spy flowers—bluebells? hosta?—through my window and ponder growth. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu conjectured that you cannot grow until you confront the void within.
“Become totally empty,” he wrote. “Quiet the restlessness of the mind. Only then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness.”
That was what I discovered. I was empty.
After so many years of following Scientology’s rules with the goal of reaching enlightenment, I experienced a realization so difficult to swallow that it was staggering. I was nothing but a shell—a brittle, hard shell—of a person. Appearances can be so deceiving. From the outside, I looked pretty good. I worked hard. I was financially successful. I devoted myself to the church. I sold my religion to anyone who was willing to bite. It will fulfill you like nothing else you have ever known! I would say. Yet there was nothing inside of me. Nothing. I was taught to feel nothing. By conforming, by doing what others did merely because they did it, I had paved the way, in the words of Virginia Woolf, for a lethargy that “steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.” I had become “all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”
But there’s something to be said for emptiness. Once it becomes obvious to you, all the important matters become apparent too.
Truth has empowered me. Truth. Verity. Certainty. I know who I am now. I know what I did and didn’t do. I am not afraid of the truth. I have come a long way and paid the price for knowing the truth about myself. I will never lose my way again. I am determined to “speak out the whole truth,” as Mahatma Gandhi often put it. Silence is a form of cowardice.
I am finding my way in my new spirituality. I have promised myself never to put all my beliefs under one heading. I find solace in reading the Bible and quotes from Buddha and Mark Nepo’s book Finding Inner Courage. My practice of meditation and prayer has brought me to God.
Grace has saved me too. When I think of grace, I think of the simple elegance, the refinement of movement, of my own children when they race across the lawn. I’ve come to believe in another kind of grace too. Life bestows gifts upon us, often unmerited. The key is to recognize and appreciate them. My children and Charley are my greatest gifts. When I reflect upon how each came into my life, “grace” is the only description that fits.
For too long, I sped through my days, rushing through breakfast with my children, often leaving them with caregivers while I worked. I loved my children fiercely as any mother would. As a single mother, I was preoccupied with providing the best life for them. It may sound obvious, but what has changed for me is that my children are no longer part of my to-do list. Drive this one to practice. Check this one’s homework. How’s that art project coming? I am much more focused now on savoring moments with them. They can be small, like when we laugh and act silly together. They can be important, such as the first time one of them learned to ride a bike.
By appreciating how incredibly beautiful and wonderful my children are, I have learned to notice and take in other gifts. Nature means more to me than it used to. And I don’t have to go to Yellowstone National Park either. I open the window, feel the breeze, embrace the sun.
> I struggle to explain the importance of romantic love in my life. I want to do it justice. I want to say that a person in love is consumed with the other and possesses a need for her or him as raw as hunger. I was not prepared for how much love has changed me. It came to me late but came to me just the same. I have never been so happy, so balanced, so free. The idea that Charley feels the same about me is intoxicating.
Charley is beautiful, brilliant, vivacious and the love of my life. Not a minute goes by without me thinking of her or being aware of her in some way, even if she is not around. When you are loved and appreciated and understood, it changes the way you look at life. I wish this gift for everyone. There is a happy momentum; you live in the present and you are confident in the future because you will be there for each other. You are bound to each other. This overwhelming sense of union, to me, is the central characteristic of love.
There are still times when I feel angry and defeated and scared, but not very often. Mostly, I am grateful. I know I went through all of this for a reason. I needed to be humbled. I needed to be reminded of how it felt to be marginalized and small and without hope, which led me back to empathy. I am emotionally free from the vicious, judgmental restraints of Scientology. My children are healthy and happy. My mom is safe and we can finally have a real life together. And my relationship with Charley is stronger than ever. I feel like I have tapped into a real energy that flows in this world, which is love. I have a lot of repair ahead of me but this time I’m doing it differently!
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