20 YEARS: Scientology leader David Miscavige made his wife Shelly vanish
According to our sources who were actually there at the time, it was near the end of August or the beginning of September in 2005 — 20 years ago this week — when Shelly Miscavige obtained a car from the motor pool at Scientology’s “Int Base” near Hemet, California, and made a desperate drive to Los Angeles to save her marriage.
She and her husband, Scientology leader David Miscavige, lived together at Int Base, but for several months Dave had been working at church offices in Los Angeles on a special project and was staying in an apartment he had there at the time. Dave made a brief trip back to Int Base and blew up over some things Shelly had done in his absence that he apparently believed were disloyal to him. He then returned to LA.
And so Shelly, determined to follow him, took a car and left the base. She was never seen there again.
Some time later, some of the people at Int Base, a place which was home to several hundred of Scientology’s inner hardcore “Sea Organization” workers, could see that Shelly’s mail was being redirected to a smaller compound that Scientology operated about 60 miles away in the San Bernardino Mountains and near a place called Lake Arrowhead.
That small compound, which housed maybe only 12 or 15 people, is the headquarters of a super-secret Scientology subsidiary known as the Church of Spiritual Technology. Most Scientologists were unaware of CST, and even most of those familiar with CST and its work — to archive founder L. Ron Hubbard’s words and lectures in underground vaults to survive civilization collapse — had no idea where its headquarters compound (known as “Twin Peaks”) was located, or its other vault locations.
Based on multiple lines of evidence, including public records, we believe that Shelly Miscavige has been confined to CST’s Twin Peaks compound near Lake Arrowhead since that day 20 years ago when she made her desperate drive from Int Base.
She has been seen outside the compound on numerous occasions. Two years after she was banished there, in 2007, she was allowed to go to the funeral of her father, Maurice “Barney” Barnett, which took place on a boat in San Pedro Harbor. We know this because her sister Suzette was living with Marc and Claire Headley at the time and told them that she saw Shelly on the boat at the service. Shelly was in the presence of her “handler,” a woman named Anne Joasem, who had been sent to Twin Peaks with Shelly along with another woman, Shelly’s Scientology auditor Antonella Tisi.
Suzette told the Headleys that Shelly met her in the bathroom on the boat in order to get away from Joasem for a moment, and quickly told Suzette that she was in trouble and wouldn’t be able to help her anymore.
Shelly, in other words, knew in 2007 that she was a prisoner. And she’s a prisoner today.
Leah Remini had been friends with Shelly, and she didn’t know that something was up with Shelly until she went to the wedding of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes at a castle in Italy in November 2006. Leah noticed that Dave was there without his wife, and that he was playing grab-ass with his “personal communicator,” a woman named Laurisse “Lou” Henley-Smith. Shocked and outraged, Leah filed an internal Scientology report on Dave that got her sent to the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida for three months of reconditioning that she was charged $300,000 for. She has written that the wedding, and seeing that Shelly was not there, was a key moment in her eventual defection from the church seven years later.
We first wrote about Shelly missing from the public world of Scientology in 2012, while we were still at the Village Voice. The next year we broke the news at the Underground Bunker in July 2013 that Leah had left Scientology. And a month later, we broke the news in August 2013 that Leah had filed a missing-person report about Shelly with the Los Angeles Police Department.
There was a lot of confusion about Leah’s missing-person report caused by other media, confusion that Scientology has taken advantage of. Leah filed her report with the LAPD on Monday, August 5. The police dispatched two detectives to meet with Shelly, who told them she was all right and didn’t want to make a public statement. (We only learned years later where this meeting took place and that Shelly was accompanied by Dave’s personal lawyer, Jeffrey Riffer.) We found out about Leah’s missing-person report on Wednesday night, August 7, and broke the news of it at the Bunker the next morning, August 8.
By then, the LAPD had already met with Shelly, and told reporters who were calling about our story that Leah’s report was “unfounded.” Some news outlets then made it sound like the case had been opened and closed that same day, and that it was a frivolous report on Leah’s part. Scientology has pretended that this is the case to this day.
The truth is, Scientology took Leah’s report very seriously, served up Shelly to the LAPD to convince them nothing was wrong, and then promptly put her back in her mountain prison, where she has remained another twelve years.
There were other times Shelly has been seen outside the CST compound. Mitch Brisker, Scientology’s former film director, saw her in Redlands with her handlers in 2008. A woman in Crestline, about a mile from the Twin Peaks compound, believes she saw Shelly with some handlers in town at a grocery and a hardware store in 2015 and 2016. There’s also a voter registration record which suggests Shelly may have spent at least a short amount of time at another CST vault location in Petrolia, California.
But based on our sources and documentary evidence, we still believe that Shelly has spent almost every day of the last 20 years at the small Twin Peaks compound in the San Bernardino Mountains, cut off not only from the outside world, but even from her own family.
Why? Because David Miscavige has decided, like he has in other cases, that he cannot trust Shelly anymore, and that she is an enemy, and that he will keep her in her mountain prison so that he never has to see or think about her ever again.
As Jean Brousseau put it on Leah’s TV series — JB was David Miscavige’s brother-in-law for 16 years when he was married to Shelly’s sister — “Dave will keep her where she is until she dies.”
Some former Scientologists are ambivalent about her. This has always been the case. They remember that Shelly helped Dave run Scientology and could be a ruthless Sea Org taskmaster in her own right.
But for how long will California and San Bernardino County law enforcement allow David Miscavige to get away with imprisoning his wife for 20 years?
Shelly is now 64 years old. She has sisters and other family members who would like to communicate with her and see her.
And Leah Remini would still like to know what happened to her friend, and to offer Shelly the opportunity to come out and rejoin the world.
How many more years will the number one question we get, and that Leah gets, be “Where is Shelly?”
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I'm not certain I know why Shelly stayed at the base while Dave went to LA. It is not the usual pattern to that point, you'd always see them together.
But I do know that conditions at the Int Base had seriously deteriorated. I know, how can you say that about a place enclosed in razor-wire topped fences? It is true, however, that a long complicated series of issues were dropped on us, demanding all kinds of changes. In some ways it was just the same old same old but in others it was a bit new. The SP Hole was really getting nasty though it had been around in some form for a few years.
1. Dave said he was moving to the G units, the slightly higher status cottage units. If the Int Base was a resort, as it used to be, these would have been called cabanas or some such. They are detached two-unit accommodations with a kitchenette and common recreation area. On each side of the rec area there are two bedrooms. One of the things that made Dave go ballistic is that Shelly was packing up their things for the move. Which he ordered in writing. Typical Dave.
2. Dave was completely bonkers on the Gold Organization Board. I visited the Int Base briefly in 2005 and the big magnetic org board was completely scrambled. All the name plates were shoved up to the top, Dave's way of saying he was doing all the work.
In a normal company, you try to find the best person for a job. Hiring and firing until you build an organization.
All that is impossible at the Int Base. The only way to get there is to go through months or sometimes years of interrogations. Or get busted. Hubbard set it up that way intentionally to avoid hiring people that would rat him out. People with integrity, in other words.
In 2005 there had been almost no new arrivals to the Int Base for some years. I think Adam Reuveni was one of the last recruits. Gold had a large contingent of cast-offs from higher organizations. Nobody that was hired to do any particular job. Just random true believers.
In Hubbard's world that was not an issue. We were all trillions or quadrillions or whatever years old, we'd all done every conceivable job, anybody can be trained to do anything. Film Director, Design Engineer, Book Designer, Compilations, High Voltage Electrical Engineer, HVAC Technician, all the construction trades, Musician, Audio Engineer. Whatever. Just grab some random teenager without even a 7th grade education, get him to read the Hubbard scripture on the subject and throw him on the job.
Anybody who has ever worked at a real job can imagine how well this worked out. The Org Board was always a mess and any attempt to fix it always made it worse. The real solution would have been to shut down the whole show, move production to LA and start from scratch. Which is eventually what happened.
Shelly actually made some sensible changes, near as I can tell (I was Blown for Good by the time she was exiled). This also drove Dave ballistic because they were not exactly the same changes he wanted. But wouldn't tell her. And wouldn't have worked anyway.
I suspect there was something else going on that we will never know until Shelly escapes or Dave is tried for false imprisonment. The above are the two big issues that I know about but realize they were both completely created by Dave. Shelly was in a lose-lose situation.
One little story about that CST location that most don't know. There was a big project in the 80s to re-record all of Hubbard's lectures and get them into publicly releasable form.
Lots of random tapes existed, many in horrible condition. Equipment was set up at CST to copy tapes in a standard format (full-track 1/4" tape, I think 15 ips). I won't go in to the very long tangled tale of how all this was set up. but suffice it to say that one of the jobs at CST was to copy tapes. All day, every day. For weeks, months, years. Set up one machine with a tape, set up the other with blank tape, hit record on one machine and play on the other. Of course you can entertain yourself by actually listening to the tapes. Ha!
The story we were told, no way to verify that it is actually true, is that a team of recordists found another way to entertain each other. Hit record, hit play and then play - with each other. This is a family-friendly substack so I won't provide further icky details. Needless to say, the participants were RPF'ed. We only found out about it because they assumed the tapes recorded in this fashion may have included flaws, substandard portions, due to the icky bits for example. Or simply fail to meet the high standards that an attentive recording team would instill. Ha! again. So they were all recalled.
Possibly Shelly could even now be kept busy by maintaining those old machines. They throw nothing away. But not by using them, all the tapes that could be rescued were done being re-recorded in the early 90s.