Authors: Jenna Miscavige Hill
Beyond Belief (49 page)
I simply cannot express how much this meant to me. Up until then, it felt as though I and a few others had been fighting the Church with our backs to the wall; people were telling me I was crazy, wrong, and suppressive. To see a group of people rise up like this in defense of the many who had been wronged by the Church was a huge testament to the kindness of the human race. Most of these people had no previous involvement with the Church. Unlike the media, this group wasn’t afraid of what the Church said, or about getting sued. Now it felt like there was a whole army in our corner.
Anonymous organized a worldwide protest on February 10, 2008; it was the first of many. Members of the group wore Guy Fawkes masks to protect their identities, knowing the Church harassed detractors as they rallied outside Scientology sites all over the world. They bought a huge amount of attention to the subject and made the Church squirm.
In the meantime, many ex-Scientologists who had previously been anonymous were now coming out, including Marc and Claire Headley. As it turned out, Marc was the anonymous blogger with the screen name “Blown for Good.”
Inspired by all the activism we’d been witnessing, Dallas and I started putting together ideas for our own website, with some sort of information center and even a nonprofit group for people who had left the Church and needed help. Around this time, an ex-Scientologist, Kendra Wiseman, contacted me. Her father was president of Scientology’s Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a watchdog group with an antipsychiatry agenda. Kendra had her own bad experiences with the Church and wanted to start a website, to be called exscientologykids.com. She told me that she had already spoken to Astra Woodcraft, another prominent Church critic, about the project. Astra had been in the Church since she was a kid, and left the Sea Org because she refused to have an abortion.
The two women asked me to come on board, and I was instantly in. When Kendra showed me the site and what she had put together, I found it both perfect and amazing. It gave great information on the Church that could be understood by anyone. It offered help to those who had left, as well as a community for people to share their views. The site was launched on March 1, 2008. It was immediately the subject of many news and magazine articles and radio interviews. Many ex-Scientologists were active in the online forums, sharing their stories, offering support, and talking about their experiences.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of my letter, Astra, Kendra, and I were being recruited by the media to tell our stories. I started getting calls from
Glamour,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and ABC’s
Nightline.
Shortly after our site was launched, I did an interview with
Nightline’s
Lisa Fletcher. By the end of the interview, she was in tears. It was the first time I had publicly told my entire story. Right before
Nightline
was getting ready to air the piece, its producers called the Church for comment. Several days later, they heard back. The Church was extremely threatening, causing ABC to hold off airing the story. That same night, Dallas received a phone call from his father at eleven o’clock. He said he was twenty minutes from our house and was arriving with two very high-ranking Church execs from the Office of Special Affairs, who wanted to speak with us. I didn’t know this until later, but they had actually chartered a helicopter from L.A. to make the trip; their business was so urgent. They wanted to stop the
Nightline
interview from airing.
I told Dallas’s father that they weren’t welcome, unless they were there to apologize. A couple of minutes later, the phone rang a second time. It was one of the OSA execs traveling with Dallas’s father.
After a while, Dallas and I agreed to meet Dallas’s parents and the two OSA reps at a Denny’s restaurant nearby, because it was the only place open that late at night. The meeting started off with abusive comments from the two OSA reps about our behavior, our families, and our attitudes. One falsely called my mother a whore. The other said I was using my uncle’s name to get my fifteen minutes of fame. They were clearly living in their own world, and Dallas and I saw no point in arguing with people who were so detached from reality. But Dallas’s parents insisted that we stay and try to come to some sort of resolution, so we tried to oblige them. Finally, we got down to the real reason for the visit. The execs pleaded with me to pull the ABC
Nightline
deal, and refuse to do additional interviews. They tried to bargain with me. If I did, they said, they would lift the “declare” on my aunt Sarah and several of my friends, allowing them to speak to their families.
Dallas’s parents were also pleading with us to cooperate. Otherwise, they would have to choose between Scientology and us. Everybody was trying to force us to make a decision right then and there, but we said we’d think about it. Before departing, we were asked not to talk to anybody about this meeting and not to post about it on the Internet.
There was no way I was going to pull the
Nightline
deal, but Dallas and I were torn about refusing additional interviews. Even before the Church’s plea, we’d been on the fence about whether or not we would continue doing interviews. Through the website, we would continue to bring a good amount of attention to the stories coming out of the Church.
But both of us knew what that decision would mean. It would mean that once again, the Church would have power over our lives. There was something about giving the Church the satisfaction of that, which made us feel like we’d be enabling them to do more to us and others. In the end, we decided against it.
The next morning, we went out for breakfast and to do a few errands. As we got onto the freeway, Dallas took note of a white Ford sedan also getting onto the freeway, although he said nothing to me. As we switched freeways and went another ten miles, he noticed the same car still behind us. We got into downtown San Diego, with its many stoplights and one-way streets. The same car stayed behind us, although maneuvering so as not to be directly in Dallas’s rear-view mirror. I stopped by my office to pick up some items and came out fifteen minutes later. The same car was down the street on a side road. After I closed my door, Dallas jerked the car into motion and took off into traffic.
“Jeez, slow down!” I told him, backseat-driving as usual.
“Jenna, I think we are being followed. Do you see that white Ford three lanes right of us? I am going to make the next left, and he will swerve across and follow us.”
Just as Dallas had predicted, the car made the exact same moves as we did. We were being followed.
Dallas kept driving around the same few blocks to see how many times this guy was going to keep it up before realizing we were on to him. We managed to get a picture of his license plate when he pulled out in front of us. When we turned into a parking lot, he followed us, but took off when we got out and started walking toward his car.
As if the mysterious car weren’t enough, the Church was still trying to get to us through Dallas’s parents. In April 2008, Dallas and I decided to participate in a protest organized by Anonymous, to be staged at all the Scientology sites in L.A., as well as at various Scientology sites around the world. Again, the focus was on families and disconnection. The night before the protest, the Church’s new PR person, Tommy Davis, called Dallas’s father and told him we were going to a rally with terrorists. Upset, Dallas’s parents wanted to meet with Dallas alone. Dallas refused, and he and I went out to dinner. As usual, we were followed, this time by a guy driving a car with no license plates.
The driver sped away when he realized we were taking pictures of his vehicle. I called Tommy Davis myself, to no avail. Even though I left several messages, I never got a call back. The guy was obviously a coward, just like so many others in the Office of Special Affairs who would go to great lengths to disparage us to our families, but would never go head-to-head with you.
I’d stopped being surprised by this behavior, but at the same time it was hard not to be startled by the apparent lengths that they were willing to go to in order to disrupt our lives. They seemed to operate in their own small world where they could do what they wanted to whomever they wanted. And yet they had so little sense of what was going on beyond the borders of their own little world. They would take shots from over the walls and then hide behind them just as quickly, so they never came to realize just how removed from reality they were.
Upset as I was about the suspicious cars and their attempts to squeeze us through Dallas’s parents, I was more disturbed by what those actions demonstrated about the Church. The distance between their world and the real world was on full display. This wasn’t just about controlling the people in the Church, it was about controlling any and everyone around them—no matter what the cost.
On the morning of the protest, Dallas and I drove to L.A., where we met Astra and several other friends. Dallas and I had the jitters, as we had never demonstrated before. However, when we got there and saw how many people had turned out, it turned out to be very uplifting, and made us feel supported. It was a blazing hot day, and there were at least two hundred protesters. Everybody was wearing masks, and we were all picketing outside the Blue Building on Fountain Avenue. There were tons of ex-Scientologists, many of whom had already done so much to raise awareness.
The Headleys also turned out at the protest that day. We started at PAC, where the Church had security guards blocking their road, L. Ron Hubbard Way. We protested on Sunset Boulevard instead. People honked in support of us. Some of the protesters used megaphones to voice their anti-Scientology message. Various media outlets were there to cover the story, and we all readily gave them sound bites.
I was startled to recognize two other protesters in particular, Mark Bunker and Tory Christman, whom I remembered from protests at the Flag base in Clearwater. They had been part of the Lisa McPherson Trust, and had frequently picketed the base. I remembered the briefings we used to get about handling these guys. It was disturbing to think about it now. Yet, here they were, still protesting against the Church.
It was an empowering day and a big success. I felt extremely thankful to Anonymous for organizing it. Many of them have not personally experienced the evils of the Church, so it said a lot that they were there standing up for people they didn’t even know. For so many years, I had felt that I was alone in my feeling that something was wrong with the way people were treated in the Sea Org. Now, I felt as though there was an army of us.
As we drove home that night, Dallas and I noticed that we were again being followed, this time by two cars. I called OSA the next day to speak to Tommy Davis, but, of course, he was not available and never returned my call.
Later in the day, Dallas’s parents called to say they wanted to speak with Dallas alone. He agreed to meet them at their house, where he learned they had just come from a meeting with several execs from the Church. They had been shown photos of us holding signs at the protest, and told that we had been hanging with people from Anonymous, which they described as a criminal organization. As it turned out, Dallas’s parents had been having meetings with Church execs, who had been trying to convince them that Dallas and I were bad people. They even went so far as to say that the only reason Dallas had married me was that he wanted to take over my uncle’s position in the Church. These secret meetings often resulted in tension and heated arguments between Dallas and me and his parents, but we knew what we were doing was right. This wasn’t just about Dallas’s family, it was about the dozens of others we would be helping.
About a week passed, before Dallas’s mother called him again. She told him the Church had contacted her to say that ABC was going to air the
Nightline
interview, and they had asked her to write a letter to the producers requesting that they not broadcast it. They wanted her to tell them that Dallas and I were liars, and had asked her husband and son to do the same. She said she told them that she didn’t want to get involved. To this day, I don’t know if any of them wrote letters against us on behalf of the Church.
Ultimately, despite all the Church’s efforts, the
Nightline
interview aired, and even with all of the drama that had surrounded it, I felt a huge sense of relief. The tumultuous few weeks of dealing with the Church had made me more convinced than ever that the only way to bring attention to those human rights violations was to do it from the outside. Theirs was such an all-consuming world that the only way true change would ever come about would be if people out here in the real world came to see the risks that Scientology posed. It was up to all of us who had left to reveal the truth about our experiences, because only then would the world see this organization for what it really was.
In the aftermath of the interview, visits to our website soared. We had so many hits that we moved to the first entry on the Google search page for the keyword “Scientology.” We got tons of email from people asking us to help them find their children or other family members in the Church and in many cases, we were able to help. More than anything, these kinds of pleas showed me that we were doing the right thing. The sheer volume of emails was unbelievable.
The site continues to average more than 200,000 hits a month. Even more rewarding is the number of thank-yous we receive from people all over the world. I am proud that the website has become a valuable tool to warn people about the dangers of Scientology, help them find loved ones they have lost to the Church, provide support to those in need, and bring awareness through school programs and the media.