Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

by Leah Remini

  In studying the policies, we quickly learned that there is no middle ground or room for interpretation. Any question we asked was answered with “What does LRH say?” You couldn’t ask your supervisor for help, other than “Where can I find the policy that says what I do here?” If you disagreed with something, the supervisor would answer that with “Okay, well, let’s see what you don’t understand here.”

  Once, as a requirement during my coursework, my supervisor gestured toward a Demo Kit, one of which was located on every student’s study table. It was a little basket filled with everyday objects like paper clips and chess and checkers pieces.

  My supervisor told me to physically act out the sexual policy for Sea Org members with the objects in the kit, in a room filled with other trainees—some reading, others doing drills.

  “By using these things here, show me what the sexual policy is,” the supervisor said. Policy stated it was forbidden for Sea Org members to have sex or physical contact of any kind before marriage. So I took a paper clip and a chess piece, to stand for the girl and boy, and rubbed them together, saying, “This is not allowed.” Then I had the girl and boy touching each other side by side. “This is not allowed.” I put the girl and boy on opposite sides of the Demo Kit basket and said, “This is allowed.”

  The supervisor took my check sheet and signed it, so that I could move on to the next assignment.

  One day when I was working, Mike Curley, an older man who was the head of the EPF, singled me out right away. He was tall and gaunt, reminding me of a cowboy from the movies.

  “You’re a little troublemaker, huh?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been told that,” I replied, trying to be cute.

  “I can tell you right now, you will address me as ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir.’ Or ‘Mr. Curley.’ Nothing else.”

  “Oh. Right. Okay.”

  “Not ‘Oh. Right.’ ‘Right, sir.’ ”

  Nicole chimed in to say, “We don’t know the rules here.”

  “Well, you’re gonna have to figure them out, because I’m putting you in charge of the Sandcastle Hotel crew,” he said, looking at me.

  Me? I was all of thirteen. Again, in Scientology children and adults are viewed equally. So it wasn’t odd to them that I might be in charge of some adults on my watch as well. I now had responsibilities that no teenager back in Brooklyn could imagine. I was learning something here in this weird environment that combined lots of freedom and lots of structure. Yeah, they made us do hard labor all day, but I was no longer being treated like a child.

  I rose to the occasion and did the job I was tasked with, and came up with a plan to reward my “crew.”

  If we got the Sandcastle cleaned in half the time, with good feedback from the guests via questionnaires they filled out, then the next day we could spend the other half of the day sitting on our asses at the pool. I was a boss running a crew and I was going to make some serious executive decisions. And I had read on my course that you reward good work. In my mind I was taking my orders directly from LRH.

  With the incentive of possible time off, the crew was motivated to clean better and faster. We got positive feedback from the guests and headed to the Sandcastle’s pool after we finished cleaning.

  We were all lying by the pool when Mike Curley walked by. He did a double take when he saw us.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he said, his face turning a deep shade of red.

  The thought that I might need to clear my plan with anybody hadn’t even crossed my mind. I considered myself an executive of the Sea Org now.

  “I’ve read the policy—”

  “Get up, clean up all these deck chairs, and meet me at the dock,” he said, then stormed off.

  When we got down to the marina, Mike was waiting for us in a motorboat. After we crammed into the small boat, he started driving out of the marina and into the bay, into the real ocean. He was dead silent, his eyes in his weather-beaten face staring out at the horizon, until we were so far out that the marina was no longer visible. Then he cut the engine and started screaming at me.

  “Never do you sit in a public place. You are Sea Org members. Don’t you know that the pool at that hotel is for paying guests only, not for you to be enjoying?

  “Do you understand me?” he yelled.

  Actually, he was shouting so loud that I almost couldn’t decipher what he was saying. Was he even speaking English? I wasn’t sure.

  “Mm-hmm,” I said.

  “It’s ‘Yes, sir!’ ”

  I thought I was following LRH and rewarding my team. And I didn’t know who these paying Scientology people were, but I was a Sea Org member, a bad motherfucker from Brooklyn clearing the planet. So, just like I’d practiced with Nicole back home, I pushed down my emotions, got my TRs in, and stayed silent. I mean, maybe Mike didn’t know LRH had written me personally. That I had come back from another life?! Hello?

  Mike kept trying to get me to say “Yes, sir.” But I couldn’t do it.

  Then he picked me up and before I even realized what was happening, he threw me overboard.

  The shock of the moment and the freezing water took my breath away, and for an instant I thought I was going to drown. But I sputtered and began frantically dog-paddling.

  “Yes, sir!” Mike shouted.

  I couldn’t do it. The words just wouldn’t come out. Once I gathered myself, I became calm. The waves were choppy but I was okay, I could swim. I began to tread water. This had become a battle as far as I was concerned. Although I wasn’t sure if I would win.

  Mike, who was following a policy practiced by LRH called overboarding, which entails throwing a crew member overboard as a form of reprimand, picked me up by my shirt again, but this time it was to pull me back into the boat. We returned to the marina in silence. I was soaking wet and humiliated at what had happened, but there was a part of me that thought that deep down, Mike Curley might just respect me for not backing down.

  —

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER WE moved to Flag, we went back up to New York to see my father.

  Shortly after we arrived, as we were sitting around the kitchen table, he asked, “What are you doing there in Florida?”

  “I’m a housekeeper,” I said.

  “Your mother moved you to the cult to be a housekeeper?”

  “Well, yeah. We clean hotel rooms that people pay money to stay in.”

  “You’re learning to clean hotel rooms? That’s what you’re learning?”

  “Well, yeah, but we just got there. It’s part of basic training.”

  I started getting flushed. I felt the need to defend my position and what we were doing to help clear the planet, but I was not able to present it to him the right way and ended up ultimately doing the work a disservice.

  “How much are you making?” he asked.

  “Fifteen dollars a week.”

  “Donna,” he yelled to my stepmom, “get me the Help Wanted section from the paper.”

  He found an ad and showed it to me. “You see this? A hundred twenty-five dollars a week for a housekeeper. And you’re making a lousy fifteen bucks.”

  “Well, Dad, they’re giving us room and board,” I said, once again trying to defend it. But ultimately it was no use. He was convinced that he was right and he felt the need to belittle me and what I believed in to prove it. Little did he know that by attacking Scientology, he ended up simply pushing me back into its arms. Them against us. I thought, this guy has no idea that I am fighting for his eternity.

  We returned to Florida, and I have to admit, Dad pointing out that I was making only fifteen dollars a week along with all of the hard labor was starting to bother me a little. I was here to do important work and be sent on vital missions. And more important, to wear heels, stockings, and a uniform with a cap, Navy style. I imagined myself clicking around the org
anization in my heels and yelling at people to clear the planet. But that just wasn’t happening.

  It was right about then that I noticed that one of the kids from my Sandcastle crew was wearing a uniform and was “on post,” meaning that he had a real Sea Org job that definitely was not cleaning toilets.

  “How the fuck did you get off the EPF?” I asked him.

  “You have to complete the courses and show up to study time,” he replied.

  Nic and I had been taking the opportunity of study time to hide in the bathroom and take a nap in the tub or take the hotel shuttle buses back and forth from the Fort Harrison to the Sandcastle, enjoying a break and some air-conditioning. Up until this point I was under the impression that my bad attitude was what was holding me back from moving on from the EPF. That once I had a more positive mindset, I would be magically rewarded, promoted, and assigned a uniform and, of course, the all-important heels.

  Nic and I quickly changed our ways and got on course. We wanted off of the EPF, and soon.

  While I was making progress and heading in the right direction with my training, there was one thing I couldn’t come to terms with. I thought a lot about my infant sister, Shannon, a sweet little blond, blue-eyed thing. Whenever I could, I went to visit her in the nursery, where she stayed during the day while my mom was working. “Nursery” was a charitable term for the motel room in the Quality Inn filled with cribs of crying, neglected babies, flies, and the smell of dirty diapers. The only ventilation came from a huge fan by the window.

  This was where Sea Org members and staff dropped off their babies at seven in the morning and then picked them up at ten in the evening when their workday was over. We had an hour for lunch, but the shuttle took half an hour to go from Flag back to the Quality Inn, so even if parents wanted to visit their children, they would have to turn around practically as soon as they arrived.

  I took advantage of any opportunity to sneak away and check in on Shannon. The first time I went to the nursery I was devastated by what I found. The person in charge was a kid like me, just some random teenage Sea Org member on post, who was hardly qualified to be taking care of children. Shannon was crying and soaked with urine in her crib. Before changing her and returning to my post, I vowed I wouldn’t let her grow up this way. The neglect was overwhelming. I would immediately demand that the person on post clean up and change the babies. I would sometimes leave my post for a while to take Shannon out of there. I complained to my mother about it, and she complained to her seniors, who threatened that she would be taken off her job and demoted. She continued to voice her concerns about it and they told her to write it up in a report, but nothing was ever done. It really weighed on me. Though I was buying into the program, it raised a question inside me: While I didn’t care so much about me, I wondered if we were doing right by this baby.

  It was at this time that my mother revealed that we had no home to return to. Dennis wasn’t coming to join us after all. At first he’d made excuses that he could accumulate more money by staying behind, but ultimately he had found someone else, gotten rid of the apartment, and moved on. He and Mom weren’t together anymore. They were getting a divorce. Dennis, the man who claimed he would never do anything to harm us, who made us change our whole lives and live within the world of Scientology, who cheated on our mom while she was pregnant, had now left us. We were heartbroken. This hit us like a punch in the stomach.

  I knew even then that moving in with my dad and stepmother was not an alternative. The Sea Org and its practices may have been hard on us, but at my dad’s house my sisters and I would be called cunts, ingrates, and selfish assholes for crimes like pulling the laundry out before it was completely dry. Dad would tell Nicole and me over and over again throughout our childhood that he wasn’t even sure if we were his real children because our mother was a slut. And on top of this, during the brief time we did spend with my dad, we lived in fear of his violent episodes. To us, the thought of living with him was worse than joining a “cult.”

  We realized now, more than ever, that we didn’t have a choice but to stay in Florida. We had nowhere else to go. We couldn’t leave our mom there to raise a baby on her own. Being in the Sea Org was what our mother wanted for us, and so though we worked long hours and lived in a filthy dorm, we were committed to staying by her side.

  “I promise you girls,” Mom said, “it will get better.”

  Chapter Three

  NICOLE AND I WERE NOW put on posts with the rest of the Sea Org. Like the adults, we worked fourteen-hour days and picked up the wonderful adult habits of drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

  One habit we didn’t pick up was going to school regularly. LRH had deep disdain for the conventional educational system. Scientology abided by the idea that as long as you were on course, getting an education in Scientology, going to traditional school was not all that important. Your education in Scientology—the main goal of which was to teach you how to learn Scientology—was the imperative. We were taught that getting a Scientology education was the equivalent of getting a doctorate in the real world. Who cares about calculus when you’re clearing the planet? So because attending school wasn’t enforced, the motel room at Flag that was designated “Schoolroom” was usually empty, and although I was still technically in eighth grade, I hardly ever went.

  At Flag we did find moments to act like regular kids. Sherry and I played stupid pranks on the Sea Org boys, like putting shaving cream and Vaseline on the door handles in their dorm. We made them over and attempted to turn them into break-dancers in the lobby of the motel. We’d find little victories by using the hotel loudspeaker to page people at the Fort Harrison: “Mrs. Dickington, please come to Reception” and then doubling over with laughter. During “libs”—a few hours off or, if you were lucky, a whole day off once every two weeks—we would take the bus with some of the other kids to the mall to walk around, even though we had no money to buy anything.

  During this time, Sherry and I would stay up late in our bunks and share our life stories. Sherry had grown up in the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C., where her mother and stepfather had been full-time staff members. Just a child herself, she was frequently left in charge of the babies and children in the day care, often going on walks where she pushed two strollers at a time.

  Her brother, Stefan, had already joined the Sea Org, a year earlier, and was at Flag when recruiters from the New York Org came to D.C. to find new candidates for the Sea Org. With her parents’ approval, the recruiters agreed to be Sherry’s guardians. So at the age of eleven she was shipped to New York.

  All alone in a big, strange city, she was left to fend for herself. The recruiters were her guardians legally, but they did nothing to care for her. “No one made sure I brushed my teeth or had a winter coat,” she said. She had been there only a week when an executive screamed at her. Sherry called her mom to ask if she could go home, but her mother said she needed to stick it out.

  This type of thinking becomes a parent’s reality. Everything is about the church, the bigger picture. Parents refer back to policy for major and minor decisions, looking to the phrase “What does LRH say?” to advise them. All this is part of “doing something big here.”

  After that, Sherry barely had any contact with her family. Phone calls and letters were rare, and she visited her mother and stepfather for only one week every other year.

  Her stepdad had taught her all these folk songs that she would sing for me at night. I fell asleep to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” or “You Are My Sunshine” as I sucked on two fingers and held a blanket.

  Even though we were treated the same as adults, we were really just little girls.

  —

  AFTER BEING AT FLAG FOR a number of months, we had really gotten into the Sea Org rhythm. We got on the bus at eight in the morning, were on post for the next fourteen hours, smoked and drank coffee throughout, and de
veloped systems for pretty much everything. I even had a system for dealing with our roach-infested dorm room (turn on the lights and wait for them to scatter before you jump into your bed). Despite the long workdays and specific procedurals, I found openings and made the system work for me.

  One of my tasks on post was to deduct bills from guest accounts—including their food tickets. We staffers were Sea Org members, but the guests were all regular parishioners who had come to participate in auditing and training. Sea Org members and regular parishioners—or the public, as we called them—ate different food in different places. We ate rice and beans night and day or liquid eggs; they ate steak, lobster, roasted chicken, anything you could get in a normal hotel. We weren’t supposed to fraternize with the public in the first place, but with our salary of fifteen dollars a week, we didn’t have the money to eat at the hotel’s restaurants anyway.

  My epiphany was that I was the person taking the tickets! That meant I could easily go into the Lemon Tree and the Hourglass, the public restaurants, or the canteen where they served snack food, and order a chicken sandwich or a piece of chocolate cake under a phony account name. Then in a couple of days, when my tickets came into the office, I could take them to my room, burn them, and flush the ashes down the toilet. And that’s exactly what I started doing.

  I didn’t tell a soul what I was up to and I never got caught for my food scam. My attitude during this time was like “I gotta eat. I’m a Sea Org member, part of an elite group, and I’m clearing the planet, so get out of my way.” I was being trained to make the impossible happen. Rising above my own mental and physical limitations. I was feeling fierce. Having said that, I still had to live and operate within the very strict constraints of the Sea Org.